 Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. Can I welcome members and the President of The Public上 Republic to the 15th meeting of the Public Audit Committee in 2015. Can our first of all, first of all will arrange carceral services as present, to ensure that their electronic items are switched to flight modes so that they don't affect the work of the Committee. Colleagues can attrwydrae i atedsihonaethfullyn yng ngh REM1, which is a decision on taking business and private. The question is that through agenda items number 5, 6, 7 and 8 Rwy'n cael ei wneud i'r ysgol, nifer tîm, ac yn gweithio rai o'r panel woith. Rwy'n cael ei wneud i'r ysgol, swyddfyniad cyfnod 2015 i'r ysgol, pwg-raig, rydw i'r ysgol. Rwy'n cael ei wneud i AlasGyffordd, rwy'r ysgol ysgol ysgol, Peter Rieke, yw'r Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Investments at the Scottish Futures Trust, Andrew Watson, Deputy Director for Financial Strategy, and Sharon Fairweather, the Deputy Director of Financial Program Management for the Scottish Government. I understand that Alison Stafford would like to make a brief opening statement. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss with the committee the latest six-month report on major capital projects. Very detailed questions may best be answered by individual project owners, so if there are any points of detail that go beyond the information that we have with us today, my colleagues and I of course will take a note and seek to respond swiftly. When we last met on 29 April, members were understandably interested in the work under way by the Office of National Statistics, ONS, to classify a major non-profit distributing, NPD, road project, signed since the introduction in September 2014 of the rather confusingly labelled 2010 European system of accounts. The Scottish Parliament has been kept informed throughout by the Deputy First Minister, including through two IPQs and a substantive oral PQ. In February, July and September, respectively, but allow me to recap more recent events briefly. On 31 July 2015, the ONS published its decision to classify the Aberdeen Western Peripheral route project to the public sector. As there is no route of appeal, I corresponded with the ONS to seek clarification on a range of points raised by the Scottish Futures Trust on this project, and this engagement is continuing. In parallel, the Scottish Futures Trust has submitted proposals to the ONS on the hub model. Again, this engagement is continuing. As chair of the Scottish Government's Infrastructure Investment Board, I am passionate to ensure delivery of vital infrastructure in Scotland and share the concerns of project partners and stakeholders in local communities, so I continue to impress upon the Office of National Statistics the importance of the issues that we have raised with them, while also recognising their congested overall work programme. Just to say, the classification by the ONS has no bearing on how the Scottish Government accounts for these projects in our statutory accounts. The classification does have a bearing on how the Scottish Government records its activities against its HM Treasury annual budget, without a conclusive position from ONS, the budget discussions with HMT cannot be finalised. In the interim, the Scottish Futures Trust continues to engage closely with project partners to work through the implications with them. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government continues to see progress in its overall investment programme, and since my last written report to the committee, the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and Royal Hospital for Children in South Glasgow, the Inverness College, the Inverness campus, Borders Rail, Ellin academy and Ledsland primary school have all been completed. That concludes my short statement. Can I first of all ask you to elaborate on some of the issues that you have touched on, but some of the time delays and the costs associated with that in connection with the USA-10 interpretation? In terms of the time delays and costs, I would like to ask Peter Rickey to respond to that, because he is close to the individual projects. We have said that across the NPD programme, all of the contracted projects are going ahead with no impact on cost or their delivery programme from the ONS issue. That includes the AWPR project itself. In HUB, there are a number of projects that are now affected or more likely to be affected by this issue. Those list of 12 projects have been made public to the Parliament. They include the Lothian Health Centre Bundle, an Invercide care home project, Kelso High School, New Battle High School, Baldragon Academy, Elgin High School, Dalbiti Learning Centre, Barhead High School, Our Lady in St Patrick's High School, AIR Academy and now probably going to be affected given the timescales of responses on our discussions with ONS, Campbelltown and Oban High Schools and the East Ayrshire Learning Campus. Those projects across the HUB programme are currently approaching a stage where they'll be ready to reach financial close and we don't anticipate that they'll be able to do so over the coming weeks. You talked about the cost implications of that until we finalise the position with ONS and are in a position to move ahead with those projects and reach financial close. We're not yet able to say what the full cost implication, if any, of delays to those projects are. There'll be a range of different scenarios with either contractors that have prices held or contractors where the final project price may be subject to some inflation given the state of the commercial negotiations on each of the projects that are affected or could be affected. Can I ask in terms of your advice that you're not able to specify because of the nature of the contracts but I take it that you'll be aware of the details of the contracts and you may have been able to quantify that? So, these contracts are contracts that are not yet signed and it depends on some of the contractor's prices for projects that have reached what we call stage 2, their fully costed submission in the HUB development process. More recently, the contractor's price may still be valid by the time we are able to tell projects that they're able to move forward to financial close. Others that have been in this position for a little longer, for example the Lothian Health Centre bundle, it's unlikely that the contractor's price they put forward originally will still be valid because it will have gone beyond its usually three month validity period. So, we will then have to refresh the pricing with the contractor and going back to the market because all of these have transparent subcontractor prices involved with them. So, there could be a little bit, well there will be, some process to go through with the contractors to refresh their pricing for those projects. You mentioned various projects and obviously representing constituencies and my particular interest would be Elgin High School and there are serious concerns there. Convener Allison Stafford mentioned ONS July, I think he said July this year. I actually have a written answer from John Swinney which is the 13th of February this year which says that they are looking at contractual changes and et cetera to reach a conclusion and would keep Parliament informed. So, I wouldn't like to mislead anyone and say that this has suddenly come out of the blue in the last three months. It has been known for some time, so convener, I just want to put that on the record. My first question is, you mentioned, we've got today projects included within the pipeline for the first time and you mentioned some including Campbelltown. Are there other projects including the ones we have on our page 60 and 61 today, quite a considerable list? Will any of these be affected or is it just the ones that you mentioned, Newbattle Abbey, Elgin, Veldragan, Kelso, NHS Lothian and Inverclyde? This is a worry for people that the Murray Council thought they were going ahead with Elgin High School and they are under a lot of pressure plus apparently the costs are rising by 100,000 a month and they are really worried about who is going to pay. I appreciate the point that is being raised and given it's about a detailed project again, Peter Eke, because he is close to it, we'd be best to answer this. Thank you. The ONS issues will only affect projects that are due to be revenue funded through either the hub or MPD programmes, so they would be noted as design, build, finance and maintain and have a flag against them as being revenue funded in the documentation. The majority of projects that have been recently added to the list are primary school projects that will be design and build projects and they will not be affected by the ONS issues. Can I just ask on that point, I mean I did try reading and understanding this last night, I think I sort of got halfway there, but my understanding, for example paragraph 20, there's not publicly, the government hasn't put a cost on delays, so I accept that, I also accept that the SFT has submitted proposals and the ONS are expected to respond next month, but my understanding is that the ONS reclassification depends on the amount of private sector involvement as opposed to public sector. We've had so many discussions on this committee about what is a PFI and what is an NPD, and I think it was Audit Scotland who said that the NPD was a form of private finance initiative. If it was the old PFI, would we not be facing this reclassification? Is there something to do with the way that NPD or a hubco projects are set up that is making this investment more tricky, more difficult, less able to fit in with the ONS reclassification and ultimately leading to delays? Ms Skyline, if I start first and then I'll ask Peter to come in, you're not the easiest people. It's not, and you're not alone. Actually a number of people who aren't having to specialise in it, having to just understand it, and I appreciate when you're trying to explain that to constituents, that's very difficult as well. Just around the, you've referred to a paper which I think is private to you, so I'm unable to address any particular things that you've referred to in a paper there. I'm happy to look at it afterwards and come back if that's useful. I mean, the particular thing with the Office of National Statistics is actually a statistical body, and it's there ultimately to set out in statistical terms what's the size of the private economy in the UK and what's the size of the public economy in the UK, and it starts at very high level. The reason why the ONS is part of our considerations in relation to these projects is that they have published or the Eurostat that they work to have set out new standards for assessing projects, and those new standards actually came in very late in the day in September 2014, and that's why it's particularly nudging up against the Aberdeen Western peripheral route that was signed in December with the long lead times that they have. The Treasury have chosen to use the European standard as an indicator of a measure of how then they are asking Whitehall departments and devolved administrations to budget for these things. That only changed in 2009 when actually the accounting and the budgeting were absolutely aligned, and when the UK Government changed to international financial reporting standards, they actually realised that that would sound the death knell to any kind of PFI, PPP, MPD project because they actually were in conflict in many ways between the two, so they actually at that point, it was all really straightforward in the scheme of things up until 2009, but when the accounting arrangements changed the budgeting was out of kilter, and all PFI's and PPP's wouldn't have continued at that point, so Treasury found another reference point for determining how we score activities against the actual Treasury budget. At that point they said, right, we'll use this statistical indicator, and the reason why we're having to deal with looking at this now is because that statistical indicator has changed. It's changed materially, and it's changed at short notice, because when the interpretation document that was to help us understand what this new standard came out, that interpretation document came out in August 2013, that didn't give any particular cause for concern, the Treasury actually held a session for experts in the field, so Peter went along and others, in March of 2015, sorry, March 2014, and that didn't show any particular cause for concern. It was only when then the Eurostat themselves revised their own interpretations in September, sorry, August 2014, as they published the standard in September 2014, that actually that started to signal that there were some material changes here that actually then started to call into question the private classification, not only of the things that we've got well underway, and if you think of the lead time for building any roads, it's a long lead time, but also for things that the UK Government were looking at as well. So the private finance initiative, private finance 2, actually was one that was very early on, so I think irrespective of the type of model that is being used to get in effect additionality over and above the usual capital programme, these latest changes have caused not only us in Scotland, but also the UK arm, the infrastructure UK. I'm trying to remember all the names rather than the initials, infrastructure UK have had to take a look and stop and pause again, and similarly in Europe it's happening across the piece as well. Colin Beattie. Thank you, convener. Just for my information, is it the invariable practice to form an SPV for any of these individual projects? The very simple answer to that. The record colleagues just referred to that. I mean, just so that we can refer to it faster than any other. Special purpose vehicles. Just for the record though, just so that we're clear for it. Yes. When a project is project financed, the financiers like to see a very tight ring fence around the money that they're putting into the project, and they're able to see exactly what risks they're exposed to and exactly what rewards they're going to get for taking that risk. And the way that in financial circles that's generally done is to set up a specific company whose only job is to do that one project. And the company is set up to do the project, and after the project is completed 25 years later, then the company will cease to exist. Those companies, because they only do one thing, that project are known as special purpose companies or special purpose vehicles. And it is always the case that for these sort of projects a company like that is set up. Okay. Now, in the past, these SPVs have been wholly owned by Hubco, and they had the name of Sub Hubcos, and somebody must have thought for that name, Sub Hubcos. Now, you're changing that to design, build, finance and maintain, which is DBFM, and obviously that reduces the public sector interest in that company. What are the implications for that cost-wise and also management and control-wise? So, Peter, sorry. No, no problem at all. The previous structure, as you said, was for the project company that was set up for every design, build, finance and maintain project to be 100% owned by the hub company that was set up in each of the five hub territories to take forward the hub programme. The revised proposals are to set up separate, as you've said, DBFM codes. We love our acronyms. Design, build, finance and maintain companies. So, a specific company for each project that will be owned 60% by the private sector development partner in the hub area, 20% by a charity and 20% by the public sector, with half of that being SFT and half of that being the public body that holds the contract. Within that overall structure, there will be no implication for the industry charge, the cost that is paid for the project, and within the governance arrangements, we will still have a public sector director sitting on the board of that delivery company to bring good governance and accountability to the delivery side of the project and enhance the overall partnership arrangements over the long term. This charity that's going to have 20% of the company, a newly formed private sector charity, can you give me a bit more information about that? I can give you a bit more information about it but the charity is being established currently and in the lead on that are the five private sector development partners across the hub territories. It will have independent trustees and it will have one trustee from those private sector development partners and it will have one trustee from the Scottish Futures Trust and that charity will be established to take these stakes in the design bill for now to maintain companies and then we'll have the ability to use its share of any of the returns from those investments to take forward charitable works associated with the types of facilities and types of programmes that hub is there to deliver. Now will this charity be across Scotland or will it be localised? The intention is that there will be one charity set up across Scotland because some of the activities that it will be involved in and will be reasonably specialist in investing in these projects but I believe although I can't speak for the charity because the charity will be set up and have independent trustees that the way it's likely to work will be that it will act as a foundation and will fund other charities to do works in local areas rather than itself undertaking charitable activities. Clearly my concern is that money that's raised through the local community should go back into the local community and you know if it's a national charity there's always the risk that it gets siphoned off elsewhere on the basis perhaps of greater need. I would certainly think there's a lot of need in my constituency and I'd like to see anything that comes up in that constituency, any earnings from that constituency go back into it. I think it's absolutely right to want to see local benefits from local projects. That's one of the things that hub is there to deliver overall. Over the very long terms of the 25 years or so that the charity and the projects are set up for, I'm sure there will be distributions made to various causes across the country but I can't say exactly which cause at which given a point in time. I asked particularly about the possibility of any additional costs for example arising from the use of this new model and in the document that I've got here it does mention about the possibility of increased cost of borrowing because of the new structure. So there is a cost to having to move to this structure or potentially? So slightly separately from the establishment of the new structure one of the things that ONS have potentially got concerns about is public sector bodies making capital contributions to projects and paying for elements of the construction during the construction period or when the construction is completed rather than as a charge over the life of the use of the asset. So it is likely that rather than public bodies making those contributions typically that would be a local authority in a schools project and they would be able to borrow from the public works loan board and make a contribution of capital. It's likely that that will have to be financed through the project and repaid over the life of the asset in the unitary charge. There could be a will be likely to be a small increase in the cost of borrowing from that element of the structure and the if there is then that element would be picked up as part of a sort of no better no worse arrangement that's been come to you with the local authorities and any additional cost of financing would be picked up in the central contribution to those projects. Doesn't sound like a great outcome, I mean if we're paying extra for the borrowing will this depend on what the ONS comes up with or is this a done deal? Nothing's a done deal at the minute and all of this. As Halston said we're awaiting feedback from the ONS. So this is if you like speculation at this point that if it goes one way or the other then we will incur these extra costs. All of this the remains subject to discussions that are ongoing with the ONS. Can be a clue to that something maybe we should be following up on down the line. We'll bring the shoot morning for a very brief supplementary and then we'll bring in Conquia. Thank you. If I might just add something then very happy to take the question. Obviously Mr Beattie is concerned about some of the changes that might happen and whether there are some marginal cost implications. They are likely to be marginal and what will happen at some point in time will be weighing up the relative benefits of a marginal change to enable things to continue on the trajectory that they are. One of the key things that all this is about is that when the capital budget has been cut that's being used in Scotland in terms of the main grant and we've seen a 25% reduction in real terms since 2011 up to the end of this year then that has been the trigger as to why these sorts of initiatives and they're not the only ones they're actually bringing additionality. So bringing additionality for Scotland as a whole is bringing additionality in local areas. So it will be weighing up those those two issues but clearly there has been a real drive to still keep this pipeline live and active and we know it has a really really material impact on the economy of Scotland. If you look at last year around about one third of the whole of the economic growth performance in Scotland was attributed to infrastructure investment and the vast majority of that is what was happening through the public domain whether it's through our grant funding whether it was through national housing trusts whether it's through local government's own investment or through NPD and hub type initiatives. So all of these things are really material so we have to weigh up the whole picture when we get to that. Can we keep these changes as focused and as brief as possible? Just to say that I appreciate what's been said there but my concern is that we're talking about basically a bookkeeping change here which is going to have a real cost on our projects and I think that's unacceptable. Okay can we note that and we'll take action on that issue. It's regarding the creation of the charity. Will that be able to deal with the arm's length foundations that Alice that it's something that we've actually had a discussed before regarding colleges and it's something that we've actually highlighted in the committee in the past. So Peter? This charity will be established explicitly for the hub programme and to deliver investments in hub projects and to deliver with those returns on investments charitable funding for the similar sorts of activities. It's very separate from anything that's happened previously or you've discussed previously in the colleges sector. Will it actually be an opportunity for the charity to maybe invest in the college sector and also through the arm's length foundations? If I respond to that and I think it's still too early to tell obviously part of the development of the charity is still around getting the additionality through the hub programme. I think we would want to cross that hurdle first and then obviously we don't want to see any cluttered landscape at all in Scotland if there's any potential from that. Bearing in mind the charity will be something that will will by its very nature as Peter has already said be you know have to operate in a position that's more distant so it would have to decide what its own arrangements are going to be but I wouldn't rule anything out but equally at this stage I think one step at a time is is the best advice to follow. In one of your answers there but it's just in relation to hubco and in particular the health board partnerships I have to admit that my interest in this is the northwest Edinburgh health centre which is due to be built at Muirhouse and there's a degree of worry since this is kicked off and obviously in terms of we don't know what's going to happen with the exactly what the future funding is from what I'm gathering but has there been any cost implications in terms of the work that's already been completed on these projects? You know obviously there's design aspect you know in the way that things move forward to you. Is there anything that's that might end up a a costing to these projects just because it's stalled and the initial work has begun? Peter? The development work done to date on all of these projects has been around the design development, the scoping of the project, the understanding of the requirements and taking the design on that and on the other projects to really quite a well-developed stage. None of that design development is wasted work. There's a full commitment to taking all of these projects forward once the issues have been resolved. So our anticipation as I've said is that given that that one has been in this state for a little while now is that there will have to be a refresh of some of the of the construction costings but then that will allow the project with its current design and its current scope on its current land that's been allocated to it to go ahead. Has there been any problems caused to any of the other partners on the back of this? I can't tell you the detail of every individual project and whether there has been costs to any of the partners involved to date. There will have been costs in relation to design but that's work that's very much needed and will be important going forward for the project. One of the areas that we looked at when you were here the last time was the issue regarding the two seamall ferries. Very recently, Ferguson's and Port Lasgo were awarded the preferred bidder status. The final announcement has not yet happened and certainly with the paperwork that we have in front of us it suggests that the final announcement was to take place by the middle of September. I'm keen to have an update on the situation regarding that particular order, please. My understanding is that they are very close to getting a final signing on that that we expect up in the next few weeks. I haven't got the detail as to the delay to getting that signing but I have no reason to believe that they won't be signed very shortly. Were there any complaints from any other member states within the EU regarding the process that potentially had an effect upon the fact that it's not been completed by the middle of September? Not as far as I'm aware. I'm okay, thank you. Can I invite the committee to thank the panel for their contribution this morning and we can follow up via the clerks for any further information that might be required. Could I just allow for a brief suspension for a bit of a minute to allow the next witnesses to change over? Good morning. I just reconvene to agenda item number three, which is the section 23 report accident and emergency performance update. I'd like to welcome our panel of witnesses, Paul Gray, director general of health and social care and chief executive of NHS Scotland, John Cunningham, the NHS Scotland chief operating officer, Catherine Calderwood, the chief medical officer and Alan Hunter, the NHS Scotland performance director of the Scottish Government. I understand that Mr Gray would like to make a short opening statement. Thank you, convener. I'm conscious of time and therefore we'll keep it brief. We have faced some very challenging times in relation to accident and emergency performance, especially last winter and I want to acknowledge that and the effect that that has on patients and their families and also the fact that staff through that have worked exceedingly hard. The key factors affecting performance last winter included unprecedented levels of activity, about which we can say more later if it helps the committee and bed days lost as people awaited care in their communities and therefore delayed discharges. Scotland's unscheduled care performance last winter deteriorated, but it was in line with other parts of the UK and indeed on a similar basis to other similar health systems across the world. Our core A&E performance was about 1 per cent better than England in winter 2014-15 whereas the previous winter had been about 1 per cent worse than England. We're not at the standard, we're striving towards, I accept that. However, performance against the four hour A&E target increased to 95 per cent over July and August from a startling position of 86.1 per cent in the week ending 22 February when we started publishing weekly. In the last three months, performance has reached 95 per cent on seven occasions and has been above 94 per cent on a further six occasions during the same period. There has also been a significant reduction in long waits over 12 hours by 99 per cent since January to the week ending 27 September. In order to ensure that we have a structured approach going into this winter, we've launched a new improvement approach to unscheduled care using six fundamental actions and again we can speak to the committee about that if they find that helpful. We've invested a total of about 55 million in this year to address issues affecting performance, particularly over winter. I can give a breakdown of that if the committee would find it helpful. That is significantly higher than the investment last winter, which was 29 million. We've also issued winter guidance to NHS boards two months earlier than normal. We are focusing on tackling unscheduled care from a whole system perspective. I want to assure the committee that we are well aware of the complexity of the issues affecting performance. We are working hard with our partners to deliver sustainable benefits to ensure that patients receive timely treatment and safe person-centred and effective care. I am happy to answer questions from the committee. If we do not have information immediately to hand, we will provide it as quickly as we can in writing after the committee session closes. Thank you, Mr Gray. Can I adjust the open by referring you to your submission, but also you referred to the examples of key national programmes on scheduled care? Noted in some of the bullet points, for example, it says that senior clinicians and managers are working together at site level to ensure accountability for performance. There is another example. It says that using the best available data to develop patient capacity and management plans, which are regularly updated by site-based teams to ensure good flow and minimise delays. I have not done this this morning, but I am sure that if I google search this, I could probably find a similar reference to those terms in previous documents that have been provided by Health Board over the years. They are pretty generic terms that have been used over a number of years. Why would this be any different from what has been done before, or should it not have been happening anyway? I think that your last point. First, convener, I believe that there ought to be close working between managers and clinicians, and yes, if it has not been happening, it should have been happening. I absolutely agree with that point. What is different about this year is both the fact that we have started this process earlier and we are checking very thoroughly that boards are actually following through on that. Boards will be publishing their winter plans on their websites by the end of this month. We are two months ahead of the game, and we have put in more money. If you would like more detail on the direct engagement that we have had with boards, Mr Conachan would be the best person to provide you with that. I will, however, give you my personal assurance that I have been engaging directly with chief executives and senior clinicians through the chief medical officer to ensure that the importance that we attach to doing better this winter than we did last winter is clear. Why would not a manager and a clinician not have worked together before? I can go back to the acute services review in Glasgow. I have seen reference to the exact same terms that I have met with senior officials at your level for the past 15 years, and every meeting that I have had with them, they have said that clinicians and managers will be working together much closer to deliver the targets that they need to meet. Are you saying that that has not happened before and that it should happen now? What is it to say that it is happening now? For example, in NHS Lanarkshire, the committee may recall that there was a report published by Healthcare Improvement Scotland in December 2013. One of the issues there was the capacity of clinicians and managers to work together because the governance structures were too complicated. In NHS Lanarkshire, for example, there is now, in each of the three main hospitals, a tripartite operation involving a senior administrator, a senior nurse and a senior doctor that was not there before. It is there now. There is something there that was not there before. I and colleagues can give other examples from other hospitals, if you wish. In each of the hospitals in Glasgow, there is now a formal identified site director. That was something that was not there before. We have changed the system. We are not simply hoping that this will happen by the delivery of instructions or guidance. The system is different. When I was on the health committee in 1999, we were actually asking managers and clinicians to talk to each other. I have to say that I was giving it a retire in a few months. I do find it quite sad that, 17 years later, we are making a recommendation to say to managers and clinicians to work together. My first question is that it is about the increased demand. I have a paper from Audit Scotland today, and it is very disappointing that the percentage of patients seen in the A&E departments in minor injury units within four hours fell to 87 per cent in January, the lowest since April 2008. What I was hoping for today, Mr Gray, was that we would get a better understanding of the increase in demand. We all accept that. What I have not seen is the increase in demand. I was hoping that you would address some of the issues. In health questions a couple of weeks ago, convener, eight questions were on the shortage of GPs. If you cannot get a GP, we all know that. You go to accident emergency. We have not had serious winter pressures for many years, and a report out yesterday looked at the attendance rates in Ayrshire and Arran are twice as high as Tayside. We also, in the same report, know that the number of attendance in the most deprived area is about more than three times the number twice as much as the least deprived area. I had hoped, given all this time and all the pressures on A&E, that the report came out in May 2014. We are discussing a report that is about 18 months old. I had hoped that the recommendations, instead of asking clinicians and managers to work together, I had hoped that it would be a little bit more analytical, more forensic and understanding why we have those pressures at A&E and what is being done about it. I would like you to answer that, but I hope that you do not share my disappointment without addressing the challenges that we all know in the system. You have made two important points with Scanlan. One is about the clinicians and managers working more closely together, and the other is about the demand on the system. The chief medical officer will be able to give you some details about both of those, if that is acceptable to the committee. On the point of clinicians and managers working together, I think that, as you rightly say, it sounds obvious. What we have recognised is that, in fact, it does not seem to be something that happens automatically or happens just because it should. What we are introducing is much more formal education and learning, so paired learning of managers, training managers and clinicians as part of the education when they are in training, and having groups of formal educators throughout the health boards in Scotland. Instead of just expecting it to happen because you are right that it has not, we are formalising that process. We have examples now in every health board where different departments have taken on that. It is early stages, but it is something that we are progressing. On the point of clinicians and managers, they are being educated and trained to talk to each other. It is about understanding each other's work in the system. They talk to each other, but it is more formal. You are asking them to work together, so they are being educated and trained in order to help to make them work together. Absolutely. I am speaking to the Institute of Health. That is sad, in a country of five million people. I suppose that they work together, but perhaps not as effectively as probably because of lack of understanding of each other's vital roles within the service. You have not addressed the major issues, which are the exponential increase in demand. We have a huge increase in our older population. We expect the number of people over 65 in Scotland to increase by 62 per cent by 2035. We know that our numbers of people with comorbidities are also rising exponentially, so that would be someone who has diabetes and heart disease, who has perhaps had a stroke or is on long-term medication. If I use diabetes as an example, in the last 20 years, our number of people with diabetes in Scotland has risen from 22,000 to 237,000, so more than a 10-fold increase in that condition alone. Diabetes is a good example because, in fact, diabetes puts you at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes. It also has neurological and eyesight issues and chronic kidney disease. When we have a population who is a success story, because they are living longer, those comorbidities are part of the increased demand, and those increased demand on both elective services within hospitals and emergency services. You have not addressed my question, which we all know that the silver-haired brigadier is living longer, and I am grateful for that. However, you have not addressed the two issues that I raised. That is that emergency departments' attendance rates in Ayrshire and Arran are twice as much as Tayside. Why is that? Why is it that people from the most deprived backgrounds, the number of attendances is twice as high as those from the least deprived? I would have thought that, if we understand that, only by understanding can we address that huge increase in demand. It cannot all be older people. If I take the example of multiple comorbidities, we know that those are much more prevalent in our most deprived communities. That is partly because of so-called lifestyle diseases of smoking and substance misuse, but it is also because access has not been as good or as efficient as it could have been. We definitely have propensity to the more deprived communities that require emergency services. If we look at areas where accident emergency departments, for example Glasgow Royal Infirmary, will be deprivation, that is causing a lot of that demand. Mr Hunter might come in about the differences in Tayside. Dundee is quite a poor city. There are very poor areas in Dundee and it has the lowest emergency department attendance rates. I visited Tayside at any department in August of this year, but Alan will talk you through the details. The attendance rates in Ayrshire and Arran are higher per head of population, as you say. The reasons for that are varied across Scotland. Part of it is the underlying morbidity within the community and deprivation, but it is also to do with the way that the services have been profiled over the years. Tayside has redirection policies that we have now adopted through the programme that you referred to earlier. We are promoting redirection and making sure that patients are signposted to the right locations. In Tayside, they have been doing that for about 15 years. In terms of other initiatives that are being promoted and the benefits of it being shared across the various health systems, there are frailty models taking place that are services for elderly patients attending A&E. They are designed to get the support in place quickly and identify problems before we admit the patients. If we admit elderly patients, it is better to keep them in their own community if at all possible and only admit them. For example, in Fife, they have identified that they have managed to avoid, on average, 20 elderly care admissions per week. They are building that service up. Those types of models are being shared across Scotland, so in Ayrshire Narn, they are also putting a frailty model in. In Dumfries and Galloway, they have put in weekend discharge teams to try and get the weekend discharge rates to normal weekday rates. Those things are all designed to try and address the types of problems that Ms Scanlon has isolated. Our discussions today are all of our statistics and figures and comparing those figures. In the past, we have had considerable difficulty in collecting statistics in NHS. To what extent has that improved? To what extent are those figures accurate? Well, the figures are reviewed before even the weekly publications are reviewed by statisticians to ensure that they are as accurate as they can be. The more long-term publications go through a more thorough system of checking and validation, so the figures that you get weekly are management information, which is checked by statisticians for consistency, and the monthly and quarterly publications go through more thorough checking. I would say, Mr Kerr, that we take as many reasonable steps as we can to ensure that the figures are as accurate as they can be. We also ensure through our statistician colleagues that the formal processes that are set out in relation to national statistics are followed for those that are published as national statistics. Clearly, we are measuring ourselves against the notional figures that we produce here in Scotland or targets that we produce here in Scotland. Do we benchmark as to how we are doing for overseas compared to the sister nations in the UK, for example, or Europe? Yes, we do. We compare ourselves with the other nations in the United Kingdom, but also with nations with similar health systems in Europe and beyond. If it was helpful to the committee, we can give a brief overview of that now or provide in writing a more detailed overview. I am happy whatever suits the committee. It would certainly be useful to see it. We are looking at statistics and statistics are a fairly dry thing. The important thing is the outcome for the patient. How are we measuring that in terms of those statistics? How do we measure what is actually coming out at the other end? I will turn to the chief medical officer on the clinical matters and to the chief operating officer on any detail that is required. Since we are talking about A and E performance, there is good clinical evidence to support the value of a 95 per cent target. For some patients, it is not appropriate for them to be moved out of A and E within four hours. It is better for them to stay there, either to be discharged a bit later or to be treated in that place because they are acutely unwell and it would harm them to move them. For most patients who present in A and E, there is good evidence that if they can then be either discharged or moved on to another place of care and treatment, the outcomes will be better. That is why we strive to meet that standard. It is not merely an arbitrary decision. It is higher than some of the other countries on which we will provide the written evidence. Nonetheless, in consultation with the College of Emergency Medicine and other emergency department advice, that is the standard on which we have settled based on clinical evidence because the evidence is that that is what produces the best outcomes. However, the chief medical officer will be able to see more. We have evidence that longer waits in A and E lead to increased morbidity and mortality for a range of conditions. It is the point of definitive care that is important if you need a specialist cardiologist, the quicker, the sooner that you can be not only seen and triaged in A and E, but then end up in a specialist ward because of the other facilities that are available on that unit. I will add a comment on the management and clinicians working together. Previously in Glasgow, we had a matrix-style management, which is, let us say, one manager, one clinician managing the surgical service across a number of different sites. That was fine and it was very effective for planning purposes. The latest approach to managers and clinicians working better together is a question about who is in charge on a particular day for a particular site, and while matrix management is good for planning, it is not all that effective for taking quick and short decisions on what is going to happen this afternoon if there is an issue this morning. That is one of the aspects that lies behind that recommendation. As regards measuring the impact on patients, we did issue guidance 6 August 2015, which is the most comprehensive guidance that we have ever issued in relation to winter planning. It has over 100 checklist items that we have asked boards to look at, including things such as the effectiveness of cases that are presented at A&D, and the respiratory services that are available. All boards will reflect that in their winter plan, which is due for publication at the end of this month in October. We already have draft winter plans in from boards and we are engaging on them. That whole process is now two months earlier than it has been before. We want to try to get ahead of winter and make sure that the measurement systems that we have are appropriate for patients. Just before we bring Nigel Dorran, can I just come back to the point that you raised in connection with the clinician and management relationship that effectively we are saying that a clinician who has obviously got a responsibility to their patients, are they who is effectively in charge of them? Is it the manager who is in charge of the clinician or is it the clinician who is in charge of the clinic? It depends on how local management is set up. I have, as a chief executive in three different health boards, had both managers in charge of service as well as clinicians. Personally, I like to encourage clinicians to take charge of services. I ran a system where we had a clinical director in charge of each of the major components of the service provision in that health board, but it really depends on the nature of the task and who is best to do it. Is that not the end-line to some of the challenges that are faced in that respect? The consistency of the system is that nobody really knows who the manager is. It is different in each locality. The other issue is that the actual clinicians are somewhere in charge and somewhere or not. Does that not lead to local issues as well? I agree with that, because it is a very fair point. Using the example of Glasgow, there is a rota of lead director to cover weekdays and weekends. At some points, the lead director will be administrator and at other points, the lead director will be a clinician. I think that that is a good thing, because effectively it means that the clinicians and the administrators are co-dependent on one another. To put it positively, if it is an administrator on a Friday and they leave a good well-flowing system for the clinician on a Saturday, that is beneficial, but if either of them leaves a bad product for the other, that is not beneficial. The system of rotation works well, because it means that everybody has to work in the interests of everyone else. Can we be honest about that? There are senior clinicians who really do not want to be managed, because they look at it from the perspective of they have a responsibility to their page, and that is their absolute priority. That is a culture that has existed for a long time, and it is quite difficult to manage it. I am saying this with a smile on my face. I will not be drawn into criticising either administrators or clinicians, because the top ones in either profession are the ones who are committed to the delivery of a safe versus centered and effective care. I apologise, I do not mean that you were trying to get me to criticise. I am just being realistic about the situation that we find ourselves in. There are senior clinicians who have a responsibility to their patients. They do not always like to be put in the position where somebody is saying to them, that they have to look at diverting their resources to somebody else. That is a clinical decision that sometimes they have to make. Not every clinician wants to be a manager. The point is that, by having them working together in the way that we do, we are fostering joint working in a way that we have not before. You are right that there are points at which an administrative decision about the availability of a bed and a clinical decision about the needs of the patient can come into conflict. Now that we are having the conversations, it is not simply a battle where somebody from on high says, do this and it is done. The conversations are actually happening. That is why we are training them together. I am very clear that getting people to work together and talk to one another is the way to resolve that. I can give any amount of instruction—the CMO can give any amount of instruction—the real thing that will work is when people work together. I totally accept your point about the potential conflict between administrative decisions and clinical decisions, but that is why we have to get better at it. We cannot just let it stay as a conflict. I would like to pick up on a couple of things that you have suggested that winter pressures next year will be addressed, as I understand it, by getting guidance and instruction—there I say it—out a little bit sooner, but also by putting some money in the appropriate places. I am quite prepared to believe that you will put that in the appropriate places. Money buys you people—that buys you in this context professional people, given that we all know as MSPs that it is difficult to get the right people. Maybe there are not spare people hanging on skyhooks. How is that money actually going to buy you more medical resource in the winter months when we are more likely to suffer from flu or whatever and we are far more likely to fall over in the street and have a broken rest? Thirty million of the money that I have mentioned is to address delayed discharge, which is not requiring us by and large to buy hospital-based services, but rather to support the integrated joint boards and the delivery of services that are out of the hospital. The CMO will be able to tell us how that money might effectively be deployed in more detail, as will my colleagues. We have put £9 million into unscheduled care, so again what we are trying to do is to stop the flow in rather than deal with it once it gets there. Again, we are seeking and points have been made quite validly about primary care. We are working very hard to strengthen the resource and development in primary care. In fact, the amount of money that is going straight into hospitals, if I may put it as crudely, is not a big proportion of what we have got here. Do you want to say something about the availability of staff and how that is addressed over the winter? The A&E departments who are expecting increased flow and they do that throughout the year because of times of festivals or public holidays and obviously new years eve, there are always a group of doctors—I will talk about doctors initially—who would be available to do extra shifts, so there are locum shifts, but there are usually people who are working within the department, so that is something that is built in at times of expected high pressure. That can actually be sustained for a number of days and weeks if there was particularly cold weather, for example. Similarly, nursing staff, agencies and bank staff, again, the boards are planning to have people available on the books, and if there were not people available on the books, they would look elsewhere, so that is part of a planning structure. It sounds a little bit like you are talking about people hanging on skyhooks. They are not, but they are to an extent because there is availability of hours for them to work. Right, thank you. I think that the helpful part of that—sorry, that was all helpful, but I think that the interesting bits to know that you are putting the money in trying to get people not to come in in the first place and getting them out at the other end, which does make sense because obviously your constraint is the limited resource in the middle. Can I then ask about the other side of statistics? You have spoken already about the 95 per cent discharge or moving on. Can I, first of all, encourage you to find a better way of describing this? I listened to people telling me that people have not been seen within four hours. I know perfectly well from my own experience just so on almost immediately. A triage is more or less instant unless there is a queue, which is rare. It is actually getting folk moved on, which is the four hour. Could I encourage you to find words that describe that better because the press do not understand it and therefore the public do not understand it? But you have said that 95 per cent makes clinical sense. Could I ask you about what I suspect might be an increasing trend that there are folk who come in who clearly you can triage, you can try and do some medical things with, but because they are under the influence of drugs and alcohol, you could not conceivably be moving them on in the four hours because you just cannot finish the process? Do you have any statistical understanding of what fraction of those who present are in that category? Is it variable in different places? I suspect there must be some variation. Is that an aspect of the statistics that you ought to be presenting to us because if it is significant then there is no way you can get to your 95? I can answer some of that. If we split the population that presents to emergency departments into two age groups, 0 to 64 and 64 plus, the 0 to 64 presenters in that age group by far the biggest single cause of presentation is through poisonings. That is how it is coded, but poisonings really means perhaps overindulgence in alcohol, drugs, etc. The next biggest cause is chest pain. In the post-64-year age band, chest pain, respiratory failure, etc. It is a slightly younger age group that presents, and it is significant. It is the biggest, but when we further analyse that figure in terms of presentation through poisonings, most of those presentations are in and out and dealt with within about a day. They do not tend to stay all that long in hospital, so they stay in the front end of the hospital and I think probably under observation until they can go home. Brad, that is helpful in the medical sense, but I am concerned about the statistics. I am sure that you are concerned about the statistics because it is the one that keeps people bashing you over the head with. Is it fair to say that those who come in with what we will now politically describe as poisoning are less likely to be moved on within that four hours, or am I actually up the wrong tree here? Are they as easy to deal with as everybody else? We can give you the statistics and we will get those. Splitting out the exact, whether it is somebody with an alcohol presentation that also has a serious problem that needs to be dealt with, clearly there are big differences there. In terms of the performance, I do not think that it is the biggest issue. Part of it is around how we get patients into the hospital and how we get the flow. In terms of this year, over the summer, our performance has been around 95 per cent and we have managed to get the 95 per cent of the patients through over the past two months. Clearly building the resilience of the hospitals over winter is critical and that is why we have been building up the work that we have been doing with the boards on winter planning earlier. I was going to ask the CMO to answer the point in principle that Mr Dawn was making about what types of patient is it not appropriate to move out of A&E within four hours? I think that that is the core of the point that was being asked. I think that you are concerned that we will never get to 100 per cent because it is not appropriate. There is a roundabout of 2 per cent of patients who will not be able to be moved on within the four hours. They may be because they are very significantly injured. It would often be something like major trauma. They will need a lot of many hours of working up until they are stable enough to be moved on. There would then be a smaller number of people who would be deemed the poisonings is the way it is coded, but let us call it alcohol. It would be thought to be able to be fit within a period of time, slightly longer than four hours but not needing to be admitted, but then anyone else who would not recover well enough would then be admitted to a short stay or an observation type ward, where the expectation would be that they might be discharged within less than a day or will not need an overnight stay. That figure in total is 2 per cent. Data seems to be so important. Obviously, everyone else has mentioned the gathering of data, but, if it is more broken down in them, I am certainly falling on from Nigel Dawn's theme. This year, 2015, it was very good recording that just under 96 per cent of patients across Scotland were seen within four hours. However, when you are talking about waiting times over four hours, do patients present A&E? Do they ask questions such as, why did you come to A&E? Couldn't you get a doctors appointment in time? Are those questions asked when people present A&E? I know that I get that feedback from constituents that they couldn't get a doctor's appointment, so they just went to A&E. The doctor was shutting the bank holidays, so I went to A&E. Do you gather those statistics? I think that there is a recognition that other parts of the service need to be engaged with more. There is a campaign called knowing where to go. It runs very effectively with the new hospital build in Glasgow and signposting people to NHS 24, to what the opening hours of the local GP's surgeries were, to minor injury units, which may, of course, be geographically closer and more appropriate. More longer term, Tayside has an extremely good education for the local population, and its attendance at A&E is extremely low proportionally compared to the people who have been sent by their GP. It seems to work very well. It is partly education because people are not necessarily aware of what is available and the times of availability. Again, we are also encouraging increased pharmacy input. People can go to their pharmacist and we are investing, in fact, in an extra 140 pharmacists to be placed alongside GP practices. It is appropriate because of medicines management, but it is also to help the throughput in the GP practices. Take on board what you say in a redwood report about Tayside, and certainly in my area, on a couple of occasions, when the GP surgery is closed, the pharmacy next door to them is closed also, so that is a bit of a concern. Certainly at the September weekend, I certainly noticed that as well. However, what we are seeing is that you are gathering data, but you do not gather data about that. It is about education and another issue that I wanted to raise in regard to data. We are just under 96 per cent throughout Scotland, but four hospitals, and in particular Glasgow Royal Infirmary, two from Glasgow, Glasgow Royal Infirmary and Gatt Naval in the western infirmary, were the two of the worst performing for over four hours. I picked up on Nigel Donne's question about people presenting themselves. If someone is in a state of inebriation, you may say, it may take more than four hours to actually be able to treat or see them. If we are looking at data, surely we should have that data there also. Is there any reason why, with no statistic to tell us why, those four hospitals, which are Royal Alexander and Paisley, Wishaw General and Royal Infirmary and the Western and Gatt Naval, there is no data to say why they are the worst performing? There are no reasons why we do not have any information on that. One of the things that we are keen to do is to make sure that each board has its own hospital site plan, which is why having good site management is also important. We have spent quite a bit of time setting up not just a statistical gathering exercise, but also a process in which we can roll out improvements. In order to be able to roll out improvements, we really have to know what is the target that you are trying to aim for and what you are trying to improve. We know that there is variability across some of our hospital sites in terms of the ability to discharge patients before noon. We know that there is some variability across our hospital sites in terms of turning around beds within an appropriate time so that somebody leaves one and has the appropriate response from domestic services to make sure that that bed is turned around and available. That is particularly important for those sites that have single rooms. We have a fair idea. The guidance that I referred to earlier, 6 August 2015, is the most comprehensive that we have ever issued. It has well over 100 different reference points for boards to look at to try and address those site differences. In some of these, it is a mix of improvement as well as statistical analysis. I think that we also should, when you are presenting the data in the various hospitals and I know that Mary Scanlon mentioned in D and the deprivation of some areas there, I think that we have to be quite clear when you look at hospitals such as Glasgow Royal Infirmary, it is not just a local hospital, it is a national hospital similar to York Hill Children's Hospital. Do you look into that when you are producing the data? It is not just people presenting other areas in that hospital for clinicians and doctors. There may be a lot of pressure there. I think that that is a very fair point. I mentioned a lot of things inside hospital. Of course, there are a lot of things that we need to do that are outside hospital. For instance, seven-day services. Having staff available both in the community and in the hospital side to make sure that discharges are just as effective at the weekends as they are during the day is important. Understanding what we need to do in terms of having appropriate demand and capacity planning for each site is also important because things change, patterns of attendance change. I cannot remember which colleague mentioned that earlier, but over the past 12 years or so, we have seen a significant increase in over 60 population in Scotland, about 200,000 of an increase. That brings its own demands in terms of extra requirements for both hospital and community-based services. Understanding how all of that fits together is important, and that is why we emphasise whole system planning. You might help me to remind me to mention something about Glasgow Royal Infirmary. They introduced an assessment area a number of years ago, and they have now expanded that over the past two months to include surgical GP-referred patients. They are adapting their services and their models to try to address some of the problems. In Ayrshire and Arran, they are investing £34 million—I will confirm that figure—in realigning their front-door services. They are creating a GP assessment area adjacent to the A&E departments. Those developments are happening as we speak. The one in Ayr will be opening in January and the one in Crosshouse will be opening in the summer next year. Things need to evolve because some of the buildings are older than others, and they need to adapt and move shape services to the best of the ability that they can at the moment. You mentioned the campaign the Know Where to Go in Glasgow. Is that going to be rolled out across the NHS, the Glasgow and Clyde area? As far as I know, it was partly because of the new hospital, so it spread widely to the areas of the other hospitals that were changing their services. I am afraid that I do not know about it wider into Clyde. Nationally, there is a Know Who to Turn to campaign that will be launched in the end of November. There is radio and various media opportunities. That is part of the winter plan. It sits in with the redirection and signposting plans in each of the boards. There is a national programme, and there are local events to tie into that. When I heard what you talked about earlier, I thought that I would represent the west of Scotland area and I would have never heard of it. I am glad that the work is going to take place on it. Is that purely going to be focused on the winter period or is it to be something for post the winter period? That is focused mainly on the winter period, the one in the member, but there is recognition that we need to take that forward. The guidance on redirection or signposting is getting rolled out. A number of boards are doing it. It is not just Tayside now. Fife is doing it. Grampian is doing it. Most boards and most hospitals are doing it to a degree, but they build up the staff's confidence now to do it. Tayside is taking the work about 15 years, but they have now got evidence that the local population understands and knows that if they go to the hospital, it is really something that they can go to their GP the next day or their pharmacist. They are going to get told that they need to go to their pharmacist or GP the next day, so that helps. Those types of processes we have agreed with the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. The six essential actions have site management and planning. We are all agreed with the Academy of Royal Colleges, the Collective Academy. We have clinical engagement at the top level and at the local level, because we have now got lead consultants in each of the sites looking at those issues. We are building up a process that is gathering momentum and it is the right way to do it, because if it is short, it does not always work. That is a programme of change. Certainly, using the Tayside example, I would imagine that they have collected a huge amount of data over the course of that period of time. No doubt they have estimated us to how many people they have managed to prevent from presenting themselves to the A&E in that particular health board area. I am keen to understand a bit more in terms of what the estimated figures will be for the other health board areas in Scotland. The estimated figures internationally around this are somewhere between 10 and 15 per cent of patients. It can be dealt with elsewhere. You need to make sure that the links with the community services are in place, and that is what we are doing. There are a range of initiatives there. In answer to your question, yes, between about 10 and 15 per cent of patients. That is something that would be very helpful. One other area that was touched upon, and I actually had not thought of this in terms of presenting to the A&E. It was a number of festivals, and there has been an increasing number of festivals. With the tourism sector that we have in Scotland, it is a huge part of our economy, and more people come to Scotland on an annual basis. In terms of the numbers of people who present themselves as a consequence of having an accident or poisonings festivals, how important apart are festivals in terms of the numbers of people who present themselves to the A&E? The boards plan on the basis of known events. They might be festivals, they might be football matches, so they plan on the basis of those known events to staff up effectively. It is a fact that at certain events you are more likely to get A&E presentations. I will turn to the CMO in a second. To be honest with the committee, I am less worried about festivals than I am about some other types of events that do tend. I am afraid to produce regular throughput of seriously injured people, alcohol playing apart, but also quite serious physical injuries at times, summarising from violence. The spread out of domestic violence around certain events is a big issue, which our colleagues in the police and fire and rescue services are working very constructively. The violence reduction unit, for example, in Glasgow has another major contributor to that, but certain events produce higher throughput, which is a fact. The planning is very detailed. I visited NHS 24, and the Scottish Ambulance Service is a call centre-type software, so that it, at any time, will have differing staffing for shifts. A major event such as a football match or a prolonged event such as the Edinburgh Festival over a month, the manpower and the ambulance availability are done in 15-minute slots 24 hours a day. The emergency departments are also similarly staffed with local events in mind. Can I just ask a brief, final question? People present themselves to the A&E, as we said earlier, because phone the GP and GP says that it will be three weeks before you can get an appointment. What do we tell people when they arrive at the A&E when they can't wait three weeks? What's their position now? I'll turn to the CMO in a second. One of the things about the NHS in Scotland is that if someone presents with something that can reasonably be treated at the place where they present, we will do our best to do that. We will not. There is a redirection policy, but the point is that, in Tayside, as has been said, they've been at it for 15 years, and they've got the infrastructure around that means that you can redirect people to something that is available. What we do not do at any point is that, if someone is in need of help, some clinical intervention, we don't refuse it just on the grounds that they ought to have been somewhere else. The growth in minor injury units is an example of that. Thank you. I say thank you for the contribution this morning. On behalf of the committee, and if there's any follow-up, we can arrange that via the clerk. Can I suspend the committee for five minutes? I move on to agenda item number four, which is evidence from the AGS report, efficiency of prosecuting criminal cases through the share of courts. I welcome our panel witnesses, I welcome Caroline Gardner, the Elder General for Scotland, Angela Cullen, the Assistant Director and Mark Roberts, the Senior Manager of Audit Scotland. I understand that Caroline Gardner is a short opening statement. On average, 88,000 people appear in criminal cases in Scotland's share of courts every year, and many thousands more interact with the share of court system as victims, witnesses, jurors, lawyers and members of the judiciary. It's important for all those people, and for society more widely, that the share of court system works efficiently and effectively. Our report finds that there's mounting pressure on the share of court system. That pressure is coming from two main sources, financial pressures and the nature of the cases that are entering the share of court system. As with many parts of the public sector, budgets have fallen. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and the Scottish Court Service both saw their total budgets and their operating budgets fall by proportionately more than the overall Scottish budget over the period from 2010-11 to 2014-15. The nature of cases being considered by the share of court system is also changing. There are more cases involving domestic abuse and historical sexual abuse. That is a good thing. It means that the focus on those crimes by the Scottish Government and all the organisations involved is having an effect and it's giving more victims the confidence to come forward. It also adds to the pressures on the system. Those cases may date back over many years and victims and witnesses may need additional support and time to allow them to give evidence. In terms of the overall performance of the system, one key measure is publicly reported, the percentage of cases that are completed within 26 weeks. In 2010-11, 73% of cases were completed within 26 weeks. In 2014-15, that had fallen to 65%. The data that we present in the report in Exhibit 8 on page 26 shows that there is marked variability in performance against this measure across the six sheriffdoms. We also report that there can be marked variation within an individual sheriffdom as we highlight in case study 3 on page 28. A range of factors affect how individual courts function. Those include the mix of types of cases being considered, the preparedness of procurators' fiscal, the culture and behaviour of defence agents and the accused, and the way that sheriff's principal and sheriff's manage their courts. Inefficiency in the system is known as churn. Churn is not always a bad thing, although it does cause an immediate delay. It might allow a case to be concluded earlier in overall terms, but in many cases court appearances do not proceed as planned due to problems with the correct citation and availability of witnesses, the readiness of the prosecution and the defence, or the availability of court time. Based on our costing model of court appearances, we estimate that churn that should have been avoidable cost about £10 million in 2014-15. One fundamental challenge is that this is a system made up of individual organisations who have to operate independently for good reasons, but to improve its overall performance and efficiency the system has to be managed collectively. We found that the establishment of the justice board by the Scottish Government in 2012 brought together the chief executives of the various public sector bodies in the justice sector and has improved joint working at a national level. We would now like to see that replicated at a local level where joint working has been less successful. We have also made four detailed recommendations wishing to improve the management and performance of the sheriff court system as an integrated system and public reporting of the performance of the sheriff courts. Convener, as ever, we are happy to answer the committee's questions. Thank you for your contribution. Can I open by referring to the fact that you stated in your opening statement that that was in connection with how sheriffs manage the courts? Can we be realistic about the challenges that we face here? Effectively, sheriffs are there to ensure that justice is carried out properly through judicial process. It is quite difficult for sheriffs at the same time to consider the costs associated with that, if they have to ensure that there is a fair system that is implemented properly. Is there any examples of where possibly that could be improved without compromising the judicial system? We have some very good examples on our last mark to highlight a couple for you in a moment. It is worth being clear that we are not asking sheriffs just to focus on the costs of the system. The costs are actually quite a good indicator of its overall efficiency and in how good it is at delivering justice as quickly as possible for everyone affected, not just the accused but victims, witnesses and others. We think that there is a real public interest in making sure that the system works as well as it can do. Mark, can you give us some examples of where sheriffs and sheriffs principal have had that impact on their courts? We are highlighting the report in one of the case studies on page 36, which is the extent of court management that goes on within Aberdeen Sheriff's Court. There, there has been sheriffs working together in small groups and focusing on specific areas of legal activity, whether it is summary or solemn business. That has helped in terms of earlier resolution of cases within Aberdeen Sheriff's Court. That has been a very active approach by sheriffs in that court to try and improve the process of managing business through the court. That is entirely separate from the legal considerations that sheriffs have to take into consideration, which is as important. Obviously, the other challenges that are faced in terms of availability of witnesses, which I know from constituents' experiences, can vary from police officers retiring and perhaps being abroad and difficult to locate to other witnesses that are difficult to contact. What can be done to improve that, because if someone is clearly making it difficult to make them self-available, even though there is a legal process to deal with that, it can be ultimately quite difficult to improve that, is it not? You are absolutely right that everybody involved in the court system does not have the same interest in making it work smoothly for obvious reasons. We are not saying that there is a magic wand that can take away the problems at a stroke. Equally, I think that we have found some examples where practical ways of working can help to improve the planning and the management of cases. Mark, do you want to pick up a couple of those? Again, just to highlight one of the examples that we have quoted in the report under the Making Justice Work programme, there has been initiatives by Police Scotland, the Crown Office and Procurative Fiscal Service and the Scottish Court Service in trying to find innovative ways to remind people that they have been cited for witness appearances, whether that is by text message or by having a record of mobile phone numbers and things. You mentioned the importance of police witnesses being able to attend court appearances. There is now a court witness standby system being instigated, which makes sure that police officers are called at the specific time when they are required in the court, rather than as sometimes can be the case that they are required to be present all day, just in case they are going to be called at a certain time. It allows a bit more precision as to when their appearance is going to be. That has assisted the amount of police time that there has been waiting to be called to act as a witness. In the report, page 7 paragraph 5, you stated that you have not included the court closures, which are an on-going thing at the moment. Presumably, you will be coming back at some point to cover that, because it will affect the dynamics of costs and so on. A lot of the costs that we are talking about here may not be absolutely relevant in the year or two down the line. The reason why we have not explicitly looked at the court closures here is mainly a timing one. The report focuses on the period finishing in 2014-15, and most of the court closures were scheduled to happen during that year. We have looked at the data as far as it is available, and it is fair to say that there is not clear evidence of an impact of the court closures on the efficiency issues that we are looking at here, partly because most of the courts affected were dealing with quite small numbers of cases, and you can see that in the data that we present. We absolutely recognise that local courts are important to local people, but in terms of the impact on the efficiency of the court system so far, there is not evidence of a direct link there. We know that the Crown Office and Tribunal Service is conducting its own evaluation of the impact of closures. We are planning to look at that evaluation and see whether there is further work that would add value on the back of that at this stage. We are keeping an eye on it, but timing meant that it is not a key part of the report that you have in front of you. It is clear that a number of cases are relatively small, but I think that the overheads might be disproportionately high. My question really was, are you going to come back down the line and do a fresh analysis of all that sort of fresh report? I think that the answer is that we will look at the courts and tribunal service evaluation and look at the data ourselves and see whether there would be value in doing that. There are some significant percentages in here. On page 25, paragraph 39, it states here that the criminal justice targets are being exceeded, which is quite interesting. The pressure seems to be coming from the summary cases where, on page 12, paragraph 13, you are stating that there is a 25 per cent increase in justice to the peace courts. The volume of cases is going through there, mainly because of road traffic offences, which is a motorist, is obviously a concern to me. Would you agree that it seems to be the summary cases, rather than the criminal cases, that the primary pressure is coming from? I will ask Mark to pick up the specific figures on the moment, because he is absolutely on top of them. Your point is recognising one of the messages that we want to get across here, which is that the sheriff court system has to be managed as a system, decisions that you take in one part of the system, whether it is the Police Scotland or the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, have an impact through and you need to understand those to be able to make sure that the flow works smoothly. Mark, can you pick up the specific factors that are driving change in there? I will go back to the point relating to paragraph 39, where we talk about the exceeding of the targets. The Police Scotland has 28 days to submit a prosecution report after someone has been charged. Following that, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service have another 28 days in which to decide what to do with that particular case. They both have targets for what proportion of cases meet those timescales and, as you say, both of those are being exceeded. Performance against those measures has dropped over the period that we were looking at. I guess the consequence of that is that that puts more pressure on the court service or now the court and tribunal service, which does have the ultimate end stop of the 26-week overall target to meet. More cases that take slightly longer to go through those two initial stages build slightly more pressure on the court and tribunal service at the end. I think that your second point was about the impact of business going through JPCours. As the Auditor General said, because this is very much a system, if there is a big increase in business in JPCours, that occupies courtroom time and courtroom availability, and that puts the squeeze on availability of courtrooms for summary and solemn business within the sheriff courts. In some cases, as we highlight in the Exhibit 1, with a map in the report, there are an awful lot of court buildings that are used for both JPC and sheriff courts. I think that the key thing that I'm trying to get out of this is that if the criminal cases are being dealt with reasonably expeditiously, then clearly the bad guys are not getting the benefit of an inefficient system. It's the summary cases that are forming the bulk of the problem here. We see here statistics such as that sex crimes are up 80 per cent or at least the detection reporting of sex crimes are up 80 per cent. We're seeing that domestic abuse cases entering the systems may well be taking longer to process. This is all important because presumably they all lead through into the criminal side. If they're managing to contain that and if they're managing to actually exceed the targets, then I would have thought that side is doing okay. The pressure is coming from the overall 26-week target. It is a combined measure of the work of Police Scotland of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and the Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service. Where there's more cases coming through on the JP courts, that adds to the pressure within the criminal side in terms of summary and solemn business as they occupy available court time for doing other JP work. It's important that we understand where the pressure is coming from. If it's coming from the summary cases, it's a concern but we need to try to understand what it is, what it means and what the knock-on effect is. The auditor general said that courts had to work separately for understandable reasons or that those cases had to be handled separately. There is, on page 35, paragraph 58, the final couple of sentences. Existing legislation means that if an individual is prosecuted in a sheriff's court for two different crimes and two different sheriff's terms, those cases can't be combined. There seems to be some indication here that there's some thousands impacted by that. On the one hand, if I got it right, the auditor general was saying that you couldn't combine these because they had to work separately, but maybe they should find a way. Not quite. The point that I was making was that we absolutely recognised that within the judicial system you have to have an independent judiciary. You need safeguards to make sure that the police can carry out their work independently and that all of those players need to play their roles independently but need to come together to manage the system. The sorts of things that Mark has described in the example of the Aberdeen sheriffdom with people getting together to manage the courts better is a good example of people managing the business in ways that don't compromise that independence of their operation and decision making. I think that we feel that there may be scope for combining cases in the way that you're hinting at within the report, but that's one example of being much clearer about where people can work closely together to improve the working of the system and where they absolutely do need to operate independently. Just finally, I was rather tantalised in page 37 by paragraph 65, which estimated £20 million could be saved each year by operating a fully digitalised justice system. Some years ago, wasn't there an attempt to put in place some sort of digital solution and didn't that get at least partially scrapped at my memory? We liked tantalising MSPs, so I'm glad that was helpful. Mark, would you like to respond to the question? I think—I may have to rely on Angela here rather more, but I think that you may be referring to an IT project that existed within the Crown Office, which we reported on a number of years ago. Angela, I don't know if you can— Yes, Mark, you're referring to the ICT project that we reported on in 2012 in the Crown Office. Since then, the justice board was set up in 2011, and one of the things that it's done all those senior people in the justice sector have developed the justice digital strategy, which was published in 2014. That setting out how they're all going to work together as part of the making justice work and IT across the sector is one of the solutions that they're looking to. On page 37, we identify a range of initiatives that are on-going, bringing wi-fi into courts as one of those things, making sure that there's video conference on links within prisons so that prisoners can speak to their lawyers. There's a lot going on, and the Government has estimated that improving the digital world and the justice system could make savings of £20 million to £25 million. Okay. Nigel Don. Thank you very much. Gwena, and good morning, orders of general, and colleagues. I'd like to concentrate on exhibit 10 on page 27 and then just unpack a graph. It seems to me that there are four different spaces within this graph. If I can start with the very top left, the courts that had a very small number of cases, understandably that may not appear to be terribly efficient. I'm proposing to discount that, having said it. The bottom left-hand corner represents a very large packed area of people who seem to work reasonably efficiently. By definition, some will, of course, be above average or it wouldn't be an average. The two spaces that are interesting seem to me to be how you compare Paisley with the likes of Falkirk and you might have put Dundee and Kilmarnock in that comparison, and then the top right-hand corner, which I'll come back to. Now, I notice if I turn over and I did that Paisley has actually looked out in case study 3, but I'm not sure that I've seen in there where you feel the answer is. I think it's just a wider description of what you've observed, and I'm wondering, back in the days when I had a different kind of salary, I would have been dispatched if I'd had two factories that were that different in their efficiencies by the appropriate director to go and work out why, surely, surely, somewhere somebody is having a look at why. You're absolutely right, Mr Donne. In my opening remarks, I said, as well as there being marked variations between the six sheriffdoms, there are also marked variations within each sheriffdom, and you've put your finger on an example of that. Case study 3 talks through what the team found when they went out and looked at Paisley and Kilmarnock 2 within the North Strathclyde sheriffdom. I think the answer is, first of all, that there are no simple answers, and we recognise that that's the case. These are complex systems with an awful lot of factors going on, and secondly, that there are some things that we know from our audit work and that we've learnt from looking at places that are doing it well do make a difference. I'll perhaps ask Mark to talk you through the detail of that a bit further, and then we can come back on what the response is to the report. I think what we heard in doing the fieldwork was quite a lot of emphasis on the impact that culture and behaviour of all the individuals who are involved in the sheriff's court system can have on overall performance. We make reference to the culture of the defence in their attitude and their approach to, for example, not guilty pleas, the behaviour of accused and so forth, and that was emphasised again and again in terms of people saying that that's a really key factor associated with the performance of, in this case, Paisley Sheriff Court. The reason we included that case study was that it was within a single sheriffdom and we tried to get as close as possible in terms of the volume of business, the distribution of crime types in safara as we could, but noted that there was that very, very sharp difference in the performance of the two. However, as I say, one of the things that we heard during the fieldwork was very much an emphasis on the culture of defence agents and accused associated with Paisley. Right, let's not try and get too parochial about it. Would it be fair to suggest that the sheriff principal has some responsibility for changing what happens there? Who's responsible for this, please? Sheriff's principal are responsible for the management of court business within their sheriffdom, with sheriffs being responsible for the management of individual courts and the effective discharge of business through that. So does the sheriff or the sheriff principal have the power to tell defence lawyers if those are the people who are making the difference that they should proceed differently? I guess that's an ongoing discussion between sheriffs and the legal profession in terms of how they approach cases. I couldn't point you towards any definite examples of where that was happening and things, and that might be a question you might want to ask of the Scottish Courts and Tribunial Service. I think that it's also fair to say that power is probably a less useful word than influence. If you look again at the case study 4 on Aberdeen sheriff court, what happens there is that the sheriffs meet together to discuss their professional practice and make sure that they're consistent, and what that does is discourage the defence agents from asking for adjournment on the basis that they might get somebody else a second time. That's one example, but it's the sort of thing that is within the power, the responsibility of the sheriffs and the sheriff principals. I think it comes back to the need for, at a local level, people to understand the challenges they're facing and to think through what are the actions that will make a difference in that particular set of circumstances. Yes, okay. Well, without getting too personal, that may be where I should leave it, but I also recognise the influence of sheriffs' clerks in that kind of environment in particular perhaps in Aberdeen. Um, could I just explore, convener, the situation in the top right hand corner of exhibit 10 then, where I find our two biggest cities. Clearly there's some kind of constraint in there. It can't be the inefficiency that comes from small numbers. It appears to be an inefficiency from large numbers, which you wouldn't have expected of itself. Does it come down to a lack of space, a lack of sheriffs, the interaction with all the other business that's going on? Or do we actually know what it comes down to, please? I think it's probably a combination of all those factors. There is a large volume of business, we've talked about the increasing sort of complexity of cases which are being heard, the competing demands as we spoke to Mr Beattie about in terms of JP business and fatal accidents, inquiries, occupying courts, courtrooms and things. There are issues about scheduling different courts to take very different approaches to the number of cases which are scheduled for a given day, and that seems to have an impact on how long it takes for cases to get through the system as a whole. And again, you've made reference to the role of Sheriff Clarks in terms of management of business, and that is a key factor in how that happens. There is no simple answer. One of the recurrent themes in doing this bit of work was, A, how complicated it was as a system, and B, that there was no one single driver that you could easily pick on to try and untangle what causes the problems. Could I just have one very quick follow-up then? I guess those in Edinburgh would argue they're just as efficient as Aberdeen in Venice, so maybe I shouldn't pick on them and I won't. Is there somebody in the Glasgow system who actually feels responsible for what's going on there? Again, I don't want to be personal about it, but is it such a diffuse system that it's no one's responsibility? I think one of the challenges that the system faces to manage itself as a system is, as the Auditor General has mentioned, is not everyone involved is seeking the same outcome, so the culture that defence agents and the accused adopt can actually have an impact on how well the system performs as a whole. Also you've got the necessary independence of all the judiciary, of the police, of procurated fiscal service in terms of making their decisions, but at the same time they all have to operate together. Is there one person who's responsible for all of that? No, I don't think there is. I think it is a very large and, as you say, slightly diffuse system, but they are working better together, certainly at the national level, to try and make things flow through the system. Good morning. There's two issues, just one, a very slight issue, and the other one is a chum that I want to raise. In your submission, you mentioned the fact that there's limited information on the full cost of prosecuting criminal cases through the share of court system, and therefore you have to estimate the cost. Is this because it's not joined up thinking, obviously, that we're talking about data and previous witnesses? How do you estimate a cost in regards to that, and why can't you get the full information? The reason why it's difficult is because the costs that are in the budgets of the various organisations involved at Police Scotland, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service all have parts of the budget for prosecution and all have budgets that cover other things as well. Estimating how much of it relates to this isn't as straightforward as you might think it was. Mark's team did a good job in coming up with a good estimate and using that to estimate the costs of things like churn, and I'll ask him to talk you through briefly how they did that. What we did was, in collaboration with the various public bodies involved, we built estimates of how long an individual member's staff would spend on a particular component of the system, so whether it was preparing a prosecution report or marking a case or appearing as a witness, we then took salary data from each of the bodies involved and basically added it all up to come up with the overall estimate of £203 million. Rather than looking at it from the perspective of the budgets of the individual bodies, we tried to build it bottom up in terms of the activities that the individuals involved were costing in terms of their salary and time costs. Thank you very much. It must have been a very long labororious exercise that was falling on from Colin Beattie's question about the various levels of the court cases. The one that I wanted to pick up on was the chun. Having been a member of the justice committee, I know that they are looking at that. We also looked at the chun and, having spent some time visiting the courts, certainly, as the convener had mentioned, witnesses, police, that type of thing, defence lawyers putting in various, what you might say, challenging, resulting in cases lasting a year, a year and a half. Obviously, chun is a huge big issue in that respect. I realise that the Aberdeen sheriff court system seems to be when it is working. Simply because, as you mentioned in your report, the challenge request for adjournments and encouraged cases to be resolved early. Obviously, they are challenging the defence lawyers. Is that being put through other courts as mandatory, or would that have to be just we might take that up? What we are recommending is that approach to joint working, rather than each sheriff simply managing the cases that come to his or her court on the day, would make a difference. The difference would differ in different parts of Scotland, depending on the challenges that they were facing. Mr Beattie talked about the likelihood of a different type of case. It was Mr Don, different types of cases in Glasgow. You would need to understand what the make-up of cases was, the extent to which things like the attitude of defence agents was affecting that, and then, together, decide what the best approach was to dealing with it. The key recommendation in the report is that joint working has made a difference at the national level, and there is a real opportunity to get the same difference at a local level using this sort of analysis and the better information that we think is needed about cost, but not just about cost, but about all the other things that make up the system. Very good recommendation, but you also mentioned the fact that individuals and defence lawyers are put them in this part of the individuals in certain areas. I know that the police were looking into weekend courts as a recommendation. Would that stop some of the churn if that was accepted in the weekend courts? I am not sure that it would automatically stop churn, but it would certainly generate greater availability of time in terms of court days and things, but that would come with increased costs in terms of a greater number of days if those courts would have to be supported by all the bodies involved. Whether that would generate additional efficiencies in the truest sense, I think, would perhaps be interesting to explore, but it may help in terms of addressing the performance against the 26-week measure that all the criminal justice bodies have. Certainly your recommendation or estimates is that churn has cost him £10 million, so, against that, having weekend courts to alleviate his churn might save money in the long run. If I could just pick in very briefly, I think that it was Angela Cullins who mentioned the fact about the new digital systems that were put in place, and obviously you went round and spoke to lawyers and courts etc. Was there any answer that you were given in the fact that we were looking at a secure email system and only one third of the defence lawyers had signed up to it, and another one was a video conferencing that she mentioned, to be installed in every prison, and that was to alleviate churn as well, and yet only 40 solicitors have less than 3 per cent signed up to use that. Was there any answer that you got about why the take-up in those two systems was so low? The simple answer to that is that we didn't have any evidence as to why there hadn't been a better uptake in those systems. I was looking at Exhibit 5 to see if there has been a huge increase in presentations, as we would call it, but the number of accused people in cases has been a variance of about 10 per cent over the past five years. To be honest, in 2010-11 and in 2014, there has actually been a reduction in the number of accused, so I then go over to Exhibit 8. If you look at the reduction in the number of people there, I find the figure of the percentage of summary cases concluded within 26 weeks. For example, I know the case across Scotland has a reduction of 8 per cent, and it's not like A&E that we've got thousands more people, we've actually got fewer people. For Glasgow and Strathkelven, the percentage of summary cases in 2010-11 was 72, and it's now 52. That area is getting significantly worse. If I can take the other outlier that Nigel Dawn mentioned, Lothian and Borders, their figures have only reduced by 3 per cent. What I'm really asking is whether the same or it would appear fewer presentations over five years the performance. My second question is about this as a measure on its own. I appreciate that it's not a single measure of efficiency, but given the similar number of cases, the drastic fall by 20 per cent is surely very concerning. Is there something behind that figure? We think it's very clear that the Sheriff's Court system is under real pressure. The two factors that we draw out in the report are, first of all, the increasing complexity of cases and the growing proportion of cases that are either domestic violence or historic sexual crimes, and secondly, reducing budgets, and we think that both of those are having an effect. You're right, we say that the 26-week measure isn't a good measure of efficiency on its own, but a number of other measures that we've looked at also show the same sort of pressure overall. There are some sheriffdoms and some areas within sheriffdoms that are doing better than others. Those are the two sources of the pressure. What seems to make the difference is how well people are able to respond to them locally by understanding what's happening for them and then putting in place the measures that they can to influence and manage them. Can I ask if there have been greater budget cuts in Glasgow, as opposed to the other sheriffdoms, that has led to this 20 per cent fall? Secondly, has there been a greater number of complex domestic abuse, sexual abuse cases in Glasgow that would help us to understand the figure? We haven't got the breakdown by sheriffdom in terms of what the budgets were, and that would be a question that the Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service may be able to help with. In terms of the cases, again, as you say, we've reported at a national level. I don't, to hand, have the breakdown of case types by sheriffdom. It's also important to note that domestic abuse is not identified as a separate crime type. What we had to do was we had to identify all the cases that were effectively associated with domestic abuse aggravator, is the technical term, which could span a range of the seven crime types that we highlighted in Exhibit 6. I couldn't answer your question immediately in terms of disentangling the data as to whether in Glasgow and Strathkelvin there had been any variation in terms of budgetary pressure or the crime type pressure? Do you understand why? In Edinburgh, the reduction is 3 per cent, in Glasgow it's 20 per cent. My second question, convener, is—I was quite surprised in the key messages on page 5. In knowing how precise Audit of Scotland always is, the key messages, paragraph 2, we estimate police Scotland, COPS, FS, etc. spent at least £203 million. When you say at least, normally you're very precise, do you not know how much they've spent? I don't mean do you not know, do they not know, is what I really meant. Just within that question, you also say that the 26 weeks for cases is not necessarily a measure of efficiency, so what is a measure of efficiency? Do we truly not know exactly how much money is spent? I've read quite a few of your reports, and putting in a figure at least is not normal Audit of Scotland. What was the figure? Do they know the figure? What can be done to better understand how the money is spent, given that there's a 7 per cent cut? Has that 7 per cent cut led to the increases, for example in Glasgow that I've just mentioned? I'll kick off. The reason why we use the wording that you've identified is that we can't be more precise than that, and neither can the bodies involved. As we said in response to an earlier question, the budgets are held by a number of bodies, Police Scotland, the Courts and Tribunals Service, the Crown Office, and they all do other things, as well as prosecuting through the sheriff court. So, as Mark described, we built a bottom-up model that comes up with our best estimate of it. We've discussed it with the bodies involved and used their starting data. I think we agree that it's the best figure that's there and it's not a precise cost. We would like to see the bodies working together to really understand both their costs and their activity better, and that should give better ways of managing it, and also better public reporting of performance. Mark, I'll ask you to pick up the question about what information is needed to manage this better and where it's going. In terms of your second question about the measure of efficiency, what we have is the 26-week measure, which gives an important indication of performance in terms of the overall time taken from charge to verdict, but that's not related in any way to any form of input, and that's purely an output. So, as the Auditor General said, what we're recommending is that there's a better understanding of the activity costs, the unit costs associated with, for example, different types of case, different types of crime, and so on and so forth, so that those inputs can be related to the overall output in terms of performance. We're keen that the Scottish Government and the other justice bodies look at our recommendation and explore how best to do that. Just have you had a response to say that they will be working with you and responding to your recommendations and trying to get a better understanding? I've already been in discussion with the court service and the Government on that. Can I have the committee thank the general on the team for the contribution, and can I now, as agreed, move it to agenda item number five, which I've agreed to do in private?