 Gw baking take up net underside and welcome living of the justice sub-committee for counsel in 2017. No apologies were received today. Our business today is an evidence session on two or that Scotland reports, the review of the police Scotland's I6 programme and the 2015-16 order of the Scottish police authority. welcome Andrew Flanaghan, and John Foley, chief executive of the Scottish police authority, David Page, deputy chief officer for corporate services strategy and change. James Gray, chief finance officer, and Martin Leven, director of ICT from Police Scotland. I thank witnesses for providing written evidence for today. We will move straight to questions from members. I refer members to paper 1, which is a note by the clerk, and paper 2, which is a private paper. Can I start by giving a small flavour of some of the things that are in the audit Scotland report? In the report, they say that it is unacceptable that they had to report to Parliament weak financial leadership in all of the three years of the Scottish Police Authority's existence. They reported a £1.2 million overspend, a £47 million deficit and a lack of public transparency. The long-term financial strategy and the three-year strategy are to be developed and implemented once the policing 2026 strategy has been agreed. Perhaps I could start with Mr Gray. If he could give us any information on the timescales for agreeing and publishing these strategies. What we are planning to do is publish an outline high-level three-year financial plan in June alongside the 10-year policing strategy and the three-year implementation plan. What we will then do over the course of the summer is work with the business to further develop the plans so that we can come back in September with a more detailed three-year financial plan, which will show how we balance getting to a financially sustainable position by the end of year 3, but also will bring the 10-year financial strategy, which will address one of the audit Scotland points, but also it is very important because what it will do is it will clearly set out the direction of travel. It will show what different options will mean financially, and it will help to ensure that we maintain our financial sustainability after year 3. There have been some changes made now, and the chief financial officer now is a reporting line to the accountable officer. How is that working and how do you anticipate that working going ahead? The way in which it works is on a day-to-day basis my direct reporting line is into the deputy chief officer, but I also meet with Mr Foley every Friday and we go over issues, but in-between times if anything comes up, I am on the phone to him with anything that he needs to know about. I have been working with John closely since I came in as an interim, so we have developed a good relationship and we understand what it is that we are trying to do, but working to David has been working well so far. Are you confident that the strategies that you are developing will address the quite significant financial problems in that? I am. What we know at a high level is the areas where we are going to make the savings and we know what the projects are that will deliver those savings. I have not got the detail yet, so we are still working on that, specifically on which projects will deliver which savings, but when you take them in the round, there are enough savings that will deliver the requirements to address the budget deficit that we currently have. Do any of the other panel members want to comment? If I could come in. To support James' view on the relationship, I think that the committee should be made aware that that relationship did not exist before in terms of the chief financial officer having a reporting line to the accountable officer and it is now working very well. I think that it is necessary and that was one of the measures that we identified when we first realised that we had some financial leadership issues in both organisations. William, do you want to come in now? You have set out some of the concerns that have been raised in the review. More recently, as I am sure you are aware, the Auditor General appeared before the sub-committee on 16 March. At that point, he said that he is concerned that the organisation does not yet have a fully worked-through financial strategy because that is a safeguard that would help to mitigate the risk of the wrong decisions being taken for short-term reasons that make things harder in the long term. I take on board what you have said, Mr Gray, about the working relationship with Mr Foley and some of the interim measures pending that long-term strategy being developed. Have there been discussions with either the Auditor General or with her officials about those interim measures that can perhaps offer some reassurance to her and to Scotland that, as I say, pending the development of the long-term strategy, there are safeguards now in place? Yes. We meet with Audit Scotland every month now just to give them an update on the work that we have been doing and the progress that we are making, but also to give them an outline of what it is that we are proposing to do just so that we make sure that they are comfortable with our approach. Having had discussions with the Auditors, they know where we are, they know what we are trying to achieve and we are looking to develop the 10-year financial plan, which is going to be in line with what they describe as best practice. We are using all the indicators that they think should be included in it to make sure that it meets that requirement. I am confident that by the time we get to September, we will have a document that is fit for purpose. You also talked about having confidence that, in terms of the three years that the deficits that have been built up can be addressed. In previous sessions, I have expressed a degree of concern that, to some extent, we may be being told what Police Scotland and the SPA think we want to hear. How realistic is the timeframe of addressing that in such a short space of time, given the extent of the difficulties that has been faced up until now? To aim to have a balanced position at the end of a three-year period is a realistic timescale. The one thing that is really around the timing of that and what we need to focus on getting right is that what we are committing to is deliverable. It is making sure that the recurring savings that come through in each of the three years are mapped appropriately and that we are not trying to front load it unrealistically or we are not trying to take the foot off to push it too much to the back. That is a key part of what we will be doing when we are looking at the timing of how we deliver the savings over a three-year period. Can you share with us—sorry, Mr Phone, I will add another question. You might be coming back and wrapping it up together. Can you give us a flavour at this stage as to how you are going to achieve that? What that is going to mean in terms of staffing levels? We will come on to I6 shortly, and I do not want to cover that ground. How are you going to make good efficiencies, given the problems that have been experienced to date? Indeed, the run-down of capital underspend is almost to compensate for revenue deficit. We do not yet have the detail of specifically where the savings will come from. We know broadly that it affects pay and non-pay, but decisions have not yet been taken as to what that might look like. While we have a draft that has not yet gone through our governance routes, that will be happening over the course of the next couple of weeks. That will be at a high level again, so it will give you an indication of the budget areas that will be affected in order to get the deficit eradicated. However, what it will not do is set out specifically at that point where the savings will come from, but that work will be done over the summer and will come back in September with something that more clearly articulates that. Yes, thank you, Mr McArthur. It is just to offer some additional assurance. Mr Gray also has a fully developed financial model, which has been tried and tested. That has been developed over a longer period of time, so we are not starting from scratch in developing something over a period of months. It is the assumptions that go into the model that will be subject to further discussion. Mr Foley, when you say a tried and tested model, where has it been tried and tested? Police Scotland accountants have ran various scenarios through it, so it is a good model. It is not particularly complicated, convener. It is a financial model, and various assumptions are put in and in to see what does that look like as you move over the period. Some of that work has been done to support the 2026 strategy that we are about to launch. It goes hand in hand. I am just aiming to give the committee assurance that we are not starting from the beginning, albeit recognising the auditor general's comments in March, which Foley has agreed with in support. The auditor general has highlighted on-going and unacceptable weaknesses of financial leadership in both the SPA and Police Scotland, and David Page, I believe in oral evidence, stated that, in the future, they will be devolving budget responsibility to deputy chief constables, assistant chief constables, and ultimately to chief superintendents in effect at business unit level. That would increase both accountability and responsibility. A recent Herald article pointed out that training and support would be provided to those with responsibility for budgets. Could you elaborate on what has happened so far in that regard? Absolutely. What we are not doing is devolving the budget responsibility without providing support for that. There is a whole package that we are providing around this devolved process. Finance partners in James's area are facing off to each of the different budget holders. We are doing training packages for them around what their responsibility looks like, what management information they are going to need. We are doing finance for non-financial manager training. We have shared the approach that we are going to be rolling out to support everybody who is a budget holder with Scotland Cree for internal audit and also with Audit Scotland. They have got visibility about that. We have developed a balanced scorecard type approach, which is going to allow those people who are receiving the budgets to score back into ours how well we are supporting them from a finance and training perspective so that we are not just going to push budget responsibility down. What we are doing is pushing the budget responsibility down, providing training support, regular management information much quicker than it has been provided before, and then we are going to be looking at the people who are the recipients of those budgets scoring ours in terms of whether they believe they are getting the right information, the right data, the right training and the right support. Likewise, I will be looking at whether, from James's team, his finance partners team, people are taking accountability the way we need them to take accountability. We are developing a joint testing process on those who have got the budget, those who are managing the budget supported by a data set. That is all in place at the moment and we are rolling it out over the next few months. Is it being piloted almost started in certain areas and if you could elaborate just exactly where it is actually started to operate? James can give you the details in terms of where it is rolling out. The first piece of work was that every budget holder has had a meeting with their business partner because we have now attached a business partner to every single budget holder. What we had previously was fairly patchy arrangements, so the first piece of work has been to sit and go through each budget book. There is a budget book for each individual budget holder that sets out what money they have against what budget line. It sounds like a fairly simple thing, but this is the first year that we have had that across the organisation. Every budget holder has gone through their budget in detail to understand what it is that they have. They have also had a session on what business partnering is about and we have been supported with some external help with that around rolling that out to budget holders. We have also developed formal written budget guidance, which we have taken every budget holder through to make sure that they understand it. That is the first piece that we have done. What we have now done is worked across the organisation to understand who needs to get the external training for non-finance professionals. We are collating that, and that will be delivered during the course of this month, hopefully. In the region of 70 or 80, I think, but I can follow up and confirm that to you. I would not want to give that as a definitive answer. I met recently with a group of superintendents and I asked them the question as to whether they welcomed that, and they were incredibly enthusiastic about it happening. They were also at pains to point out that, in some of the legacy forces, that had been the practice before, so they did not start from a position of not having an ability to do that. While things move on and some need that support, they are not starting from scratch, and they were at pains to point that out to me. This is another thing that we are doing about management information. We are providing flash reporting now on the fifth working day. Previously, the date has become available much later in a month, so we are doing two cycles of reporting now. James and his team are at the fifth working month, and this will be the fifth working day. It will be this cycle coming up this month. It will be the first time that we do it. We will provide a flash report that lets every single budget holder know where they are against their budget. It will not be in-depth analysis. What it will do is trigger budget holders to be able to see very early on in any given month exactly where they are in terms of above or over, then they will have about two weeks to work with the finance partners. When we formally reviewed the budget at the corporate finance and investment board about three weeks in, at that point every budget holder will have known where they are over and under, why it has occurred, that they have had conversations with their finance partner, and that will have been cascaded up the way in terms of the deputies and the ACCs who have been briefed and understand it. So, we will get to a point of understanding with a much better level of granularity in terms of the data that has been available to the budget holders. Again, we are just introducing that on this particular cycle. The Scottish Government has commissioned a consortium led by the Scottish Institute for Policing and Research to evaluate police and fire reform. This is at a cost of £270,000 over four years. I think that the report, the first one, was last June. Could you give specific examples of the institute's findings and how they have helped to improve policing? I just said that there is an updated report that we have recently received as well, so we have now got two reports from that. I will let Mr Foley talk about the actual finding. Yes, as Andrew Flanagan said, there has been a recent report presented to the authority. The first report related to the first year, effectively, of a year and a half, of a form or whatever, and it found that there was progress but also identified areas where we would look to see improvement moving over the course of the next year. In the second report, that suggested that there had been improvement in local engagement, which was important. It found that there was more information available in relation to access to national assets and more understanding, so there were some positives there. There were also some findings where some local police officers believed that there was adverse effects of other public sector bodies withdrawing funding that they were using for policing, so that was an issue. That is something to be looked at in the forth coming year. In relation to 2026, in particular, those sorts of information-gathering are quite useful, Mrs Mitchell, in engaging just how Police Scotland should go out there and engage locally with local authorities. The second report also said that local authorities and local representatives had a positive view of the policing service that they were receiving. We take the positives and we take the challenges and reflect them back. Colleagues in Police Scotland then worked that into their forward strategy. I wonder just on the Audit General's report and the Audit Committee's scrutiny, if there was any attempt to quantify costs associated with employment and tribunal cases and any findings that may be were found against SPA? I presume that if there was anything of significance that may have been uncovered, but I am not aware of those areas being specifically looked at, but I can double check that, Mrs Mitchell, and come back to the committee on it. Would that be up to the current date? Yes, we could do that up to the current date. Can I just ask before we move on to talking in broader terms about I6? The finance function in Police Scotland is to be increased by the filling of 15 posts. Is my understanding that all those posts are temporary? Why is that? The reason we have brought in temporary posts at this stage in time is that I wanted a bit longer to assess what the future function looks like, and we are about to embark on a transformation programme within corporate services so that the shape of the finance function is likely to change quite significantly. The resources that we brought in at the moment were to fill gaps based on the existing model, the existing way in which we work the finance function, but my expectation is that over the next 12-24 months there will be significant changes to the way in which it is done, which means that there will be different staffing requirements, so I did not want to commit to bringing people in that eventually there may not be a job in the longer term in those particular posts. Are you hopeful, though, that some of the 15 temporary posts, some of them may become permanent because it would be a shame to lose the experience of people? You are absolutely right. There are a number of those 15 posts where we will always need somebody with those expertise, so the expectation is that there are a number of really good individuals that have come in that I would like to retain them, but, obviously, they have to go through an open process when we have determined what the final posts are that we require to run the service. Rona, do you want to ask the questions about the overspending on drugs? Yes, just to continue on the budget for the moment. The money saved from previously underspending a capital budget and reform money have both previously been used to reduce the revenue overspend. Is this a sustainable financial management approach in your opinion? No, it is not sustainable. It has been done up until now because of the situation where there was a revenue deficit that needed to be addressed, but, clearly, you have to invest in fleets, you have to invest in new estate, otherwise they deteriorate over time, and then it obviously causes you revenue pressures because the cost of maintaining your vehicles goes up, etc. So, what we have done for 2017-18 is set a budget where we are clearly planning to spend capital and reform in full in order to make the investment required, which will then help to bring down the revenue deficit. That is why we are sitting with an operating deficit of £47 million instead of saying, oh, what we will look to do is maybe use some of the reform and capital. So, we have been absolutely clear that we are not doing that because it is not sustainable in the longer term. Okay. Can I just clarify? Would there be a request in Scottish Government to transfer capital and to spend to offset the revenue overspend again for this year's budget? We have no intention of doing that. There is definitely no intention of doing that. Absolutely, no. Could I just add in perhaps that last year, in terms of the issues, why we could appreciate that there was an underlying cost overrun. The issue about the capital and reform budgets was that, in the absence of a proper strategy for policing, there was a risk that we could have ended up spending money on either forms of capital or forms of reform that, then, subsequently became inappropriate. It was good sense, in a way, to not be spending that money until we got 2026 delivered, or at least far enough, down the track where we could make sensible choices. Then, it was a matter of just that the underspends in them were the simplest way of offsetting the overrun on the revenue budget, and that is what it was. It is very much a temporary measure. I think so because we do have some pent-up demand for normal capital. James mentioned fleets and cars and things like that. They run out. You cannot do it for a very long period of time, but I think that it made sense last year, but it would not make sense now if we have a properly understood forward plan and strategy for the organisation, then we can identify that. Actually, we can make sensible choices about which bits of reform or capital that we prioritise as we go forward. In treat by this, presumably the Government's allocation in relation to both the reform funding and the capital funding would be based on a bid from Police Scotland, supported by the SPA, in terms of a needs analysis. I can understand to some extent how you might delay the capital spend, not ideal but perhaps a tolerable measure in the short term. I am struggling to understand how it is that funding that was allocated for reform of the organisation cannot be spent because you may not necessarily want to go down that route of reform. Surely the basis for the reform funding was that you had proposals put to ministers, which set them supported and therefore were prepared to back the funding. I think that there were high-level projects and things identified. The question was whether or not those things should still go ahead in the absence of a proper strategy. Right. In the sense in which case the funding was allocated on the basis of false premise in that sense. You must have made a case to the Scottish Government that reform of this particular direction, whether it is high-level or granular, unless a case for funding to support reform will have been made. However, what you are telling us is that it was sufficiently vague and it may not necessarily be the reforms that you wanted to introduce. Therefore, in the short term, you were happy to spend the money to plug the revenue gap. I think that it was prudent to suspend the suggestions that had been made about reform. The biggest part of the reform budget remains the VAT payment, but it is also the case that we do not control the reform budget. It sits with the Government and we have to apply and call off against that budget. It is probably the absence of us asking for that to be called down in terms of the uncertainty that is created by trying to identify the proper strategy for the organisation. Ben Macpherson Moving on to ICT and going forward, particularly in regard to Police Scotland's written evidence at 7.2, the Auditor General described the ICT vision in the policing 2026 strategy as ambitious. I will be interested in the panel, particularly from Martin Leven, in order to achieve the ICT vision. Will the recent approach to the underspend on capital budgets being transferred to reduce the overspend on resource budgets need to end? Thanks for giving me that question. I am going to pass over to my boss, the Deputy Chief Officer, to give a substantive answer to that, but what we have now got is a situation in which there is far more thought put into what investment should come when and where. Historically, you could say that ICT was dealt with almost separately. If you take a look at the I6 programme, which I am sure we are going to cover, which is a separate operational division within Police Scotland. There was not much co-ordination between money being invested in I6, as there was money being invested in the contact command and control systems, money being invested in the intelligence system and the vision that David has got is that this should all be tied together based on absolute operational requirement, so getting a financial strategy, a long-term financial strategy based on what the operational requirement of policing is and the ICT shall absolutely become an enabling requirement of that. David, sorry to pass us over to you, but I think that in terms of 2026, it is a wider scope than just ICT investment. The different approach that we are taking this year is—and it actually flows also from Audit Scotland's consultation feedback around the strategy itself, the 2026 strategy, is that what we shouldn't be doing is utilising capital money that you need to keep the organisation functioning appropriately in a business-to-jews environment. We shouldn't be redirecting to do any of that other than its core purpose fleet ICT estates. We are running a rigorous programme around our business cases for supporting capital investment and to keeping the business going. ICT, fleet and estates are quite separate to transformation and reform money, so we are running that very separately as well. We have a £47 million deficit that we have called out, so that is an identified problem that is separate from the capital that I need to keep the lights on in ICT estates and procurement and the normal kind of running the business. Anything that is transformation and reform will be clearly linked to something that has got an outcome that supports the journey to 2026. We will have business cases that support each of that spend to James and my HR function, attracting all of the activity and the spend of reform money going forward, and that will be linked to an outcome that supports 2026. That is separate from business-to-jews capital allocation and we will utilise that fully to support fleet investment, estates, maintenance and ICT infrastructure. In terms of the Auditor General's description of the vision being ambitious, are you confident that that ambitious vision can be achieved with the appropriate business planning that you have outlined? With the approach that we are taking, yes, I think that there is work to be done. We are coming from quite a low base point in many areas. Auditor Scotland's criticism of the organisation around things like financial capability, some of our disciplines around business cases, you have to address those things before you get overly ambitious. A lot of what we are doing at the moment is putting in robust processes, procedures, different ways of looking at business case, different controls around things, so that if I am building an ambitious plan, it is built and rock, as opposed to just being ambitious. We are going to take some time. It does mean that we will have a draft implementation plan to be published alongside the strategy at the end of June. We will also have a draft financial plan. Is it a finished product? No. Could I have done it any quicker, not with the resource that I have at the moment? We will be building that during the summer, but I am confident currently that there is the opportunity with running the finances, with better financial control, that we can meet our ambitions. I would like to take a longer view of it, rather than just the immediate situation, because, as Mr Leven said, there is not so much co-ordination around IT in the past. Mr Flanagan has talked about that there is no son of I6. I understand that the genesis for I6, and I will come to a point with it, starts as a result of two HMICS reports in 2004. Whoever feels appropriate to respond in the panel, I welcome any response. We have a situation when I am told that the quote is expensive consultants, and again the quote of £1,500 a day in 2004, as mentioned. I am told that things crawled along for years, with several new costly consultants engaged. It is in 2010, and that is when it gets to the point that the programme that should have been running primarily with Strathclyde Police becomes called I6. It is at this point that the auditor general picks up the inquiry. It has been a seamless programme, albeit not a particularly efficient one, from the period 2004 to 2016. Is anyone able to say if that is a reasonable reflection on the situation? I appreciate that you may not be able to comment on specific figures, but the genesis is off. Let me try and keep it at a higher level. Clearly, I am not aware of all the history of it and certainly not back to 2004, but certainly I am aware that by 2008 to 2010 a lot of work was going on by the legacy forces in a joint project basis, and then the procurement process was quite extended thereafter. It is worth reflecting that this was a period when IT itself was going through unprecedented accelerated change in terms of the way it did, so any project that was running for that length of time was at risk of being overtaken by the technology developments that were happening. I think that it began to accelerate once Police Scotland was established, because at that point there was single control of the project, but by that time most of the main procurement decisions had been made. There was, of course, a collective decision across the eight forces and probably central services regarding platform, and I think that in previous occasions we have discussed this, Mr Leven in committee there. Are you able to say what the figure was in respect of that loss? I have heard various figures for a platform. The total amount of money invested in the platform project, and I am going for memory here, I do not have that information with me, was around £7.5 million. I thought 12 or 14, someone else tells me 20, but a significant sum of money in the list. Okay, to my understanding, and again please do not quote me in this, I will get information if you require it, it was before I started here, but my understanding was that it was £7.5 million changed hands between us and the supplier of the platformer between AgPos and a supplier of the platformer at the time. I never really saw the light of day. There were some agreements put in place at the end, I saw some of that money being reinvested in other areas, so one of the suppliers also provided other systems within policing, so an agreement was put in the end where some refund was given to us in the terms of service credits and support costs for some of the existing systems that were in place, but ultimately it was a £7.5 million right off. To try and highlight the particular area within the confines of the Auditor General's, it did not start then, there is a long genesis to get there and your entire right was to find things have changed in there with the complexity. It is what we learn from that, I am interested about, because the Auditor General's uses the term overconfidence was a contributing factor on the failure of I6. Are you able to comment on that any other panel? Again, I think that there was a belief that this could be delivered. I think that it was a very ambitious project to take a single system approach to 80 per cent of your operational needs. It is a bit like putting all of your eggs in one basket. It was also structured as a modular approach where you could break it down into bite-sized chunks and deal with it in a sort of less risky manner. I think that there has been some aspects of this that have touched on the Auditor's report about whether the waterfall approach versus agile should have been used. Those are development methodologies, but, in fact, at the time that was given the green light, waterfall was the predominant development approach to those things, and I think that probably was the right decision. However, when you take it that it was a sort of beginning-to-end system covering 80 per cent of needs and waterfall by its nature, it means that you really only get to see how effective it is when you get to user testing. It means that, again, you have put all your eggs in one basket. In a lot of the aspects of this, I think that overconfidence that it would be all right at the end is the justified position that the Auditor's General has called out. I would also agree with the Auditor's General, Mr Fooney. I think that there was overconfidence, and I would certainly say that that is a lesson learned moving forward, so we will avoid overconfidence moving forward. All ICT projects, as Mr Leven has said, will follow a different path now from what they did in 2012-2013. Nonetheless, it has been widely viewed as being a successful procurement process in this sense. You tried to get something, you did not get it and you got money back. Yes, I think that it is a successful procurement process in that sense, but, again, going back to the lessons learned aspect, which I really welcome from the Auditor's General's report, we need to take that and look forward with it and say that it is a successful procurement. We can build on that as we procure things moving forward, but we also need to recognise that we should not be overconfident and we should look to see perhaps a bit more where the pitfalls might lie in future projects, albeit that we will not enter into another waterfall arrangement again. I think that we should commend the people who put the contract together. It was a very tight contract that allowed us to negotiate very successfully with the supplier to get our money back. However, on the basis of this being a fixed-price project, with some of the complexities not fully understood at the outset, it meant that, probably in the fixed-price nature of it, you are actually getting lesser skills applied to the development process by the supplier to still try to make it a commercially effective contract from their point of view. I think that, while it was great that we got our money back, the tightness of it did actually possibly mean that the development quality wasn't as good as it should have been. I think that I've asked this question before, and I've been given a rebut that it's not appropriate to ask it, so I'll expect another rebut, but it would be good if there was an answer. The extent of the reimbursements, are they simply to 2010, or would they have any regard to 2010? No, they would only date to the point at which Accenture signed the contract. No costs incurred in putting the bid together up into that point have been reimbursed? I'll try to answer that as best as I can, Mr Finnie. The settlement figure was an amount that was agreed between the police authority and Accenture and covered a range of aspects, some of which would have related to procurement costs, but it was agreed as a figure, so it's not entirely feasible to break it down into elements that you might attach things to that happened at a point in time. You're in a negotiating position with a commercial negotiating position with another organisation, and you're trying to get the best deal that you can, and that was the best deal that we could have got, and we got more than our money back. A couple more, if I may. A supplementary and specific point, and then I'll just come back to John. Thank you very much. It's just on the point that Mr Finnie was making about the procurement, in a sense, being a successful one. I note the more cautious response that you gave to him on that point. The concern would be that the over-optimism that was baked in, and I think we'd heard previously that, to some extent, there was an over-conference in a tried and tested model from elsewhere being able to be rolled out in a similar fashion in a Scottish context, but I think what happened with that was that the efficiencies that I6 was going to deliver then got baked into the proposals for the legislation that created Police Scotland and that are now hamstringing the organisation in delivery of that. It's why the reform funding is being used to plug shortfalls in revenue. To characterise it as a successful procurement process, when it appears to have hamstrung the organisation from the outset in the way that it is, it would not be accurate. Is that fair? I think that you could only take that in terms of the strength of the contract in maintaining the fixed-price nature of it. I think that, in terms of the specification of the system, there are, for me, more question marks. Ultimately, it became almost an entirely bespoke system. Although that had been the initial promise, I think that it was a Spanish system that was going to be used as the basis of that, and it was kind of like that that would form 80 per cent of the system. In fact, that turned out to be not the case, and most of the whole development was on a bespoke basis. Now, again, that adds risk into your project by having to start everything from scratch. I think that the issue for me is that probably certain elements of what I6 was intended to do did need to be bespoke. If you take the criminal justice system, end of the system, because Scotland has a different CSJ system from all other countries, that means that that would have to be bespoke. However, there are questions as to whether, if it had been done on a modular approach, could some elements of it have had a more off-the-shelf approach? That is an open question, in my mind. However, the over-optimism that seemed to be given rise to the problems that later emerged had also given rise to an expectation of savings of the order of magnitude of 200 million pounds. There was not a kind of eureka moment at a point where clearly this was found not to be a workable solution, but before that there must have been anxieties raised. Were there attempts made to downgrade the level of efficiencies that could ever be delivered through this programme? Is there any adjustment of that 200 million pound efficiency saving? I am not aware that that was the case. Clearly there was a point when the contract was renegotiated I think in 2014 and some of the issues were tried to be addressed at that point, but when I arrived at the authority, which would have been September 15, the first meeting that I attended where I6 was discussed was that there was still a very strong expectation that it would be delivered in December 15, and that confidence was still there that it was going to be delivered. I do not think at that point that anyone had been saying, well, these financial savings are not achievable because they still believe that the system would be up and running or at least commence running in December of 2015. From memory, Mr MacArthur, if I can help there, there was a part in the process which was user acceptance testing, and that is when there started to be concern manifesting itself, and from memory and martin will correct me if I'm wrong, that was in the summer of 2015. At that point in time, the consultant that we had, our consultants from an organisation called exception, had raised concerns over user acceptance testing, and that was discussed over probably about a six to eight week period, and then next century went away to look and see what could be done to correct or lay any fears at that point. Up until the summer of 2015, it was believed that the future benefits would be adequately taken in years to come. Just to return to the success of the procurement process and for the voidings of any doubt, it's good that we've got the money back, but if you've identified a requirement to buy something and it costs £46.1 million and you get it back, then that's good, but there's been the three lost years, and clearly there was identified need. I'm talking about a perception of it. To what extent was the fact that the Spanish police situation company had done it? There's a view that people were seduced by that, that there was a system already up and running, and that's in conflict with the term that was used, Mr Flanagan, about a bespoke model that's needed. I think that it's only at one element of it that the criminal justice system has to be bespoke. Again, as I said, the Scottish system is different from all others, but other elements of it, whether it was the vulnerable person's database or whatever, would be other police forces around the world that have similar systems. Conceptually, you could do that. I think that my reference to it becoming bespoke was that what I was told was that the original concept is that the Guardia Civil model system would actually provide 80 per cent—it would be the bedrock of the system—with only 20 per cent modification for use by Police Scotland. In reality, that didn't turn out to be the case. One final question, if I may. The presentation of this is not a saving. The link between the projected expenditure to get something that was an essential part of modern policing and IT system set against the Smith MacArthur talks about the projected savings. Where does that sit at the moment? You're saying that we've saved for—if I go to buy a car and decide not to buy a car—I haven't saved the cost of the car. That was going to be expenditure in the first place. Presentationally, how do you think that that should be presented to the public? I think that, unlike most public sector IT contracts that I'm aware of, you end up that people don't get their money back or they don't get much of it back. That probably singles out in terms of being unusual. It takes you back to square one in terms of now starting again and having an ability to finance that. The issue is the one that you touched on is that there is a three-year gap now when we're not getting the benefits that we have, so that we're expected to have. In the one sense, you can say that we haven't expended the money that was originally intended because we got it back, but the reality is that we still don't have a system and we're still not getting the savings that we're expected to deliver, so we're spending more money than we need to do at the moment. I have a few preliminary remarks. First of all, let me say that I'm a member at the institution of engineering and technology. It spent 30 years from the 1960s in IT, followed by three years lecturing to postgraduate students on the management of IT projects, so that's my background. As a preliminary remark, let me just say that the procurement process failed and we shouldn't get away from that. The reason it failed is that the procurement process existed for one reason only, and that was to deliver a computer system for Police Scotland. It did not do so. It's so fact that it failed. The secondary objective of a contract, of course, is to protect the procurer in the position where delivery is not achieved. In that sense, it was a successfully written contract that delivered what was required of it, and that's the good news, but it did fail and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Just a couple of things. I heard it said that it was always in a period of unprecedented change in IT. Well, Moore's law has been around for 30 years, and Moore's law states that every 18 months the cost halves and the capability doubles. In other words, we've always been in a period of unprecedented change. If we can't manage IT projects in a period of change, we're not in the business of managing IT projects top, bottom and middle. I just made that an observation. I've heard four or five times that the Garda Seville model was 80 per cent aligned with what we required. Where did that 80 per cent come from? Who went to look at the Garda Seville model in operation, presumably from the user side and from the IT side? Who went to look at it and concluded that it was 80 per cent aligned? Martin, perhaps, can feed more into it. When I asked that question, I was told that it was some members of the police team, the user side of it, along with the technical consultants exception, and they went to look at it. I just want to press quite specifically. The very specific 80 per cent figure has been quoted four or five times in this meeting. I just want to know if that's an analytically derived figure or if it's a figure plucked out of the air. I have only had it quoted to me as part of the survey. Right. Let's try and work out where it came from. It lies at the very heart of why the system didn't meet the needs of the Police Scotland. During the procurement process, my understanding, and bearing in mind this was before anyone at sitting on this table, joined the organisation. My understanding was that the programme team, which was headed up by a senior police officer with some outsourced expertise from three different organisations. One looking after legal, one looking after contract management, and one looking after technical authority went to visit with all the shortlisted bidders and how good is your bid? There were different scorings put against a whole variety of things. The figure 80 per cent, again, I have heard that all to me. I don't know where the figure 80 per cent came from, but I think that, ultimately, I6 was of six key component parts. The vast majority of what the system in Spain would do, would essentially do for us, because policing is policing is policing around the world. Generically, you arrest people in the same way, the data flow is exactly the same thing, and it has to go where Police Scotland differs is because of our unique approach to criminal justice, and in particular, very strict data standards that we've got with our partners in the criminal justice sector. My understanding is that that's what made up the 20 per cent that requires specific bespoke work for that and other slight variances in the way that we handle things. Where the 80 per cent, 20 per cent came from, I generally couldn't tell you. I think that it is not analytical. I think that it is a wet finger in the air. This is roughly how much of the system is ready for us. However, I don't see where this plays much into the issue. I'm going to take us there precisely, and I'll say that it was an uncalibrated wet finger, but that's a different thing. It's a rule of thumb that's been established for best part of 50 years, that if you buy a system and have to change more than 10 per cent of it, you should write your own system or, alternatively, you should adapt your processes to the processes that are embedded in the system. Was that, as far as you're aware, a choice that was consciously considered and made? If it's a 20 per cent amendment, that is invariably known to be more expensive than starting with a Queen's Year paper. I'll do here, as I'm going to quote directly from the Audit Scotland report, because when Audit Scotland did the report, they spoke to everyone that was involved in the process there. In section 14 of the Audit Scotland report at this state that the I6 programme team and Accenture believe that the majority of the I6 system could be based on an existing IT system that Accenture had developed for Spain's Guard of Civil Police Service, with the remainder being bespoke development work, the existence of this IT system and the experience of working with police services across Europe contributed to Accenture being a world-led contract. Other than that, I'm sorry, I would be speculating on any information that I gave to you. I think that the words in what the Audit General has said are an important ask could be based. In other words, it was recognised that there were functionality that would need to be cleaned shape better, and that's understood. But the problem seems to me to lie in the other part of it, where it could be based, doesn't tell us whether it was considered that Police Scotland would pick up the embedded processes that were implied by the way the Guard of Civil system was structured, or whether we were going to go in and tinker with a system, a most dangerous thing, as any project manager will know to contemplate doing. I'm just trying to get to the sense of which road we're trying to travel on this, but my difficulty is, of course, the relevant people aren't necessarily in the room or available to us, so I'll give it you in a shot, please. Sorry, I lost a question when you were talking there. Well, I want to try and see if it could be based on the part of it that was thought to be just about what was needed. I would assume so. Ultimately, what I6 would have delivered would have been a combined data system—data is the key word here, not necessarily that location flow—that would provide searchable information across four different criteria, which is person, object, location, events. That's a pole system that's used in law enforcement globally, and the Guard of Civil System was a pole-based system. Logically, you would assume that, with a pole-based system that was tried and tested in live operational policing, that's going to do quite a bit of what you want to do, therefore you have to be spoke things round the side. What went wrong with the build of it? I'm not sure. What assumptions were made by people, as you say, or no longer working for Police Scotland or the SPA? I'm not really sure. Well, let me—the final point before I allow others to perhaps come in. I heard it said that the problems emerged during user acceptance testing. Who designed the user acceptance tests? I don't know much what users were involved in that, and when were the user acceptance tests designed? Of course, if they'd been designed early in the process, then the system would have been better aligned to pass the tests that it subsequently felt. Have we got any sense of either of those things? Within the I6 programme team, there were tests analysts who helped design user acceptance testing, so they were test analysts that worked for me within the ICT departments that conded across onto the programme. They worked in conjunction with the external consultant, so the technical design authority of the programme, who worked in conjunction with Accenture to develop the testing scripts that were coming across. Very, very user-focused, very user-based again. Sorry, may I just cut across you there? Every one of the persons you said were involved there were people who were not the users who would ultimately be sitting at the terminal. I'm sorry to cut back across you again, but then I said very user-focused, very user-based, users were involved in the testing. There were operational policing personnel who know how operational policing work evolved in the testing. In fairness, that's one area where I will give absolute credit to the team that were involved. They picked it up very, very fast, and they escalated to concerns very, very fast as soon as they got it because their testing regime was incredibly robust. I absolutely accept that and agree that the purpose of testing is to find problems early, and it seems that it did so. What I'm trying to work out is where the end users involved in the design of that testing, and was that early enough to have influenced what was delivered to test? End users were involved in the design of the testing. Within the I6 programme team, the vast majority of members of the I6 programme team were live operational policing personnel that were extracted from operational policing to put into the other ones that designed the testing. Obviously, the technical people were involved in a significant part of that, but the testing front was incredibly well handled and it did the job that it was meant to do. It highlighted up concerns and escalated up to the programme board. Mr Philan, you touched on the cost of maintenance of the 125 legacy systems that are still in place over £1 million. It has been stated that a programme has been commenced to update individual systems, legacy systems, just to make sure that they are viable. In other words, to stand still and not achieve any improvement or increase enhanced functionality. Can you explain just how this maintenance legacy system is being managed with the new systems to ensure that no more expenses are spent or no longer is taken to rely on these legacy systems than is absolutely necessary? I think that Martin will be able to give you more detail. I think that the approach that was taken was once the decision to cancel I6 took place and we received the money back. The approach was to make sure that existing systems could actually extend their useful lives to cover a period of redevelopment and replacement systems being put into place. A second part of that was that we then looked at what systems we had already, either under development or in use in different parts of the organisation, which could be rolled out on a national basis. The third piece of work that is being done is the creation of a new ICT strategy under the umbrella of 2026 to be clear about how we take the approach forward. That is how we sought to stabilise the situation once we knew that I6 was not going to come in. Could you maybe give some more detail because SP has stated that there is still belief that a single national IT system for replacing is still viable? How is this working? You have got timescales for this. More detail of how it is progressing just now. Are you confident that it is going to deliver the same benefits that were envisaged that obviously did not materialise from the I6 programme? Yes, I think that the key question in what you said there, in particular, is the issue of a single system and what that actually means. I think that it would be a combination of a modular approach, which would be components that build up to a single system, rather than the kind of approach that was taken for I6, because, as I said earlier, the I6 approach, in my view, was a very risky approach to developing systems of this scale. It is clearly the case that the different parts of operations that I6 were supposed to support are still there, and they still need systems, but we need a new approach to how we are going to implement that. We need to try to minimise the costs that we are currently incurring that we did not expect to. That was two really good questions. It is very valid. Immediately on the cessation of the I6 contract in July last year, we set up something called the digital transformation team, which is ultimately the experienced resource that was running the I6 programme and passed across under my direction into the ICT directorate. We gave them some pretty urgent tasks for them to look at. First and foremost, we looked at the legacy estate and what we needed to do to maintain the legacy estate. It is resilience to maintain its stability, and there has been quite a lot of background work being done there. In particular, one of the things that we did was launch a new national custody solution, so one of the key component parts of I6 was custody, which should have tied into everything else. With the changes to the Criminal Justice Act coming in later on this year, we had to make sure that our systems were prepared for that, and the legacy solutions were not prepared. We had a system that Mr Stevenson will appreciate when I say that in Strathclyde, which ran in something called Foxpro, which was quite a legacy system. We actually had no skilled personnel left that could maintain that system, so it was quite keen that we upgraded that system. We followed good practice in the process of doing that, in particular Scottish Government recommended practice around reusing, then buying, then building—that is the order that you should do—things. We reused one of the legacy custody systems that we owned intellectual property for in VDivision, which was a legacy of Dumfries and Galloway constabulary. We upgraded that dramatically and rolled it out across the country. That was all done within time, within scale, and that is now live across every part of the country. For the first time, we are able to see a global live view of every cell, facility, every custody facility across the country. That was the behest of the internal ICT development function, a user base from across the country, heavily involved, all co-ordinated by the skillset that we took out of the ISOX programme. However, we took that a little bit further as well, and something that we did not do anywhere in the country through IT was to have the ability to cross-check information from different systems, so the systems were not compatible with each other. Now, with the new national custody solution, if someone is put into custody, it is automatic that that will do their search on the criminal history system to see any previous events that that person might have been involved in. That was just a little bit of innovation and a little bit of working to do that. That is part of what the digital transformation team was doing. Another important part of what they were doing was planning for the future. We do not have ISOX, we still have 125 different systems around the country that do not talk to each other. How are we going to make all that work? There was a lot of effort put into the digital transformation team. Audit Scotland has just produced a report, which is an excellent report called Principles for a Digital Future, about the lessons learned from not just ISOX, but other projects that perhaps have not gone as well within the public sector. I am delighted to say that the principles at Audit Scotland's report were just published in May. The principles that they have brought out, which is clearly defining the need and benefits, understanding and appreciating, and the likely complexity to identify people with the right skills and experience, break the project down into manageable stages, be aware of optimism bias, and consider the procurement options early have all been brought into consideration with the work that that team has been doing. That team has since transferred across to the 2026 team, so the technical expertise is now part of the general programme, and the 2026 programme is certainly pulling all of these together. When that is launched, that will come with the IT strategy along with the financial strategy and everything else that is required to do that. I hope that that comforts your systems remain stable to answer your first point, and we have quite a little bit of planning going on with regard to the second point. If I can ask maybe about the new national applications that were to improve information across legacy boundaries, some of those new applications have been integrated with legacy systems in order to reuse reference information, and perhaps the custody information that you are talking about was a case in point. However, it is not clear whether those legacy systems, the ones that are not integrated with new applications, could cause difficulties and could stop further improvements being made and maybe lose important information such as the custody information that you managed on there? I get another really good point where I have got about 600 legacy applications operating within Police Scotland. I6 was going to replace about 125 of those, but that has left us with a bit of a hole in terms of systems talking to each other and the way we do our day-to-day jobs differs across the country. A lot of that is, unfortunately, dependent on the technology limitations that people have in, and that is where I6 is a blow and we are struggling with the delay that has come in. We sprinkled a little bit of innovation around that as well. Again, coming out from the result of I6 not delivering, we created a programme called the Integrated Data Access programme using our own technology, and with the technology guys working very closely with operational policing from around the country, we have developed a system that is in trial at the moment and will hopefully go live within the next couple of months that allows us to cross-search a lot of those legacy systems to the key legacy systems. If we put in the nominal detail for one individual that we want to look up, that will automatically search all the legacy systems and bring back any hits that we have with that. Clever innovation could potentially be part of what we are planning to do, depending on the requirements that come out, but it certainly helps us dramatically in the short term. You are fairly confident that that will cover the issue of any information that could potentially be lost in the old legacy system being recovered? Yeah, I would be doubtful if we would actually lose any system in the legacy data, where my concern would be that people might not be able to find stuff in the legacy systems while they are looking for it, so you may miss an incident from one boundary to another boundary with the legacy systems. This gives us more of a global eye view of all the information from the eight legacy constabularies. Can I just ask a couple of final questions? The auditor general has found that police officers and staff are continuing to struggle without a date in efficient and poorly integrated systems, and I appreciate, Mr Leven, what you have said. Has the failure of I6 had any impact on the effectiveness of staff and officers in carrying out their roles? I believe that it has. Significant impact? First of all, I would say that there is no detriment to what they were doing before. Officers and staff from right around the country operating the way they operated before I6 was due to come in, so there is no detriment to what they were doing before. What I would say is that there is a loss of opportunity with I6 not going live and delaying that opportunity until we get a more centralised system for all the legacy applications. If I can provide some examples of where we feel that we can make improvements, so we still have officers entering the same data into multiple systems. We have information in one nominal that could be put into a crime system, it may be put into an honourable person system, it may be put into an intelligence system, that is all separate. I6 would have certainly collated two of those, intelligence was not part of I6, but that would have collated two of those and made life easier for officers less time spent in keyboards, more time spent in communities. It has caused what I would describe as a delay in our ability to introduce mobility to officers. It is very difficult for me to roll tablet devices and smart devices out to officers around the country when I do not have a single data source for them to query, and the cost of doing that at the moment would be very prohibitive for us, whereas it would be much simpler if we had a single data source in order to do that. Our use of analytics is not as good as it could be, so we should be able to use predictive analytics to be able to go and take a look at data, but again when you are talking 125 different data sources, that becomes difficult to collate all that information into one place, and our ability to work cross boundary. We still have officers who are registered to one computer network sitting in one part of the country, and if they make a move to another part of the country or their duties would take them to another part of the country, that involves quite a bit of IT support to enable that for them to then access the systems in the different part of the country, so a lack of general control and I6 was going to enable a lot of these things, and certainly our computer network optimisation programme was going to follow I6 around the country because we were just one main system to authenticate to, currently we still got all the legacy systems to authenticate to, so it caused a little bit of a delay in our main network programme going forward. Those were the ultimate missed opportunities with I6, but again I think that we are doing it properly. I think that we have had a significant outbreak of common sense in terms of the vision that David has brought into the organisation and tying everything together, and having a financial strategy that ties into a whole IT strategy, so contact commander control, intelligence, what was the I6 programme, all operating under one central strategy, which is something that we did not have before. Okay, that has been very helpful, thank you for that. The auditor general also stated in the report that the failure of the I6 programme meant some of the benefits of police reform had at best been delayed and there are also wider implications for the modernisation of the justice system. Do you agree with that, and are you working with the wider justice system to improve information sharing? We have got a project on going with partners in the justice system, which is, and we are changing the branding to, I think that we originally called it, an online vault, but the branding has been changed, so it is a data repository that will allow Police Scotland to actively share information with the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service, the court system, the prison service and members of law society, so it defends lawyers, so we can access online evidence and that will be passed through the system, which ultimately we think will bring incredible efficiencies across the board. I6 would have made that a little bit easier, but it does not stop the project at this stage and the proof of concept is likely to be carried out around some CCTV information and how we can make that red like accessible rather than doing the very onerous manual process that we have in place at the moment, so we are working with partners in criminal justice. In fact, I had a member of Scottish Government who is co-ordinating that and our office is in Dmarnock this morning, we are just giving her an overview of exactly where we are sitting and where we think will be in six months, 12 months etc in terms of making that compatible. When will that project be completely up and running? I believe and again, I am very wary of giving false information. My understanding is that the proof of concept should be signed off to go in August this year and that is my understanding. I would appreciate it if you would keep us updated and that would be very useful if you could do that. Do members have any other final brief questions? As there are no more questions from the committee, I thank all our witnesses for coming along today and for the evidence that they have given us. The next sub-committee meeting will be on Thursday, 15 June, when we will hold an evidence session on the use of police body cameras. I now close the 11th meeting of the Justice Sub-Committee on Policing. Thank you.