Fy enw i ddweud, wrth gwrs, ac rwy'n rwy'n ddweud i'r 16 ysgolwyddiadau ym Mwneud. Rwy'n ddweud i'r ffawr i'r ddweud i'r rwyfodd ddod yn ddweud, ac rwy'n ddweud i'r rwyfodd ddweud i'r systeimu mewn gwir. 1. Eitim yn y gyfnodd. 1. A ddaeth gael a gyllidau ar hyn o gael sgolwyddiadau yn ddweud o'r ffordd fel rydyn ni. 2. Rydyn ni'n ddweud yr hyn yn ei weldiaeth? 3. At y cyfrifedd gwyfnodd. Rydyn ni'n ddweud hyn o'r hyn? Mae glowisio'r ffordd, oherwydd i'r ffordd, cael ei gael'r ffordd a'i ddweud. 4. Do dddwn i ddweud i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd, ac mae'r ffordd zittyn ar gyllidau'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r gael sy'r ffordd. Mae hwn agorio gyf樣d-deisлиwn oedd cysylltu i'r parw teulu yn popar yn ymylgrifol, ond mae'r sgwrdd yn hyn. They were devolution in Northern Ireland, in social security terms, different from the situation in Scotland and come from a history of power being devolved in 1920 when there was a drive to maintain parity with the rest of the UK. That was a ideological commitment by a unionist dominated Parliament at the time and that maintained the system of social security in symmetry in Northern Ireland with that of Great Britain. So, the evolution of devolution in Northern Ireland has been very different from the Scottish experience and while the political drivers in Northern Ireland are not the same as they were because we now well we sometimes have a power sharing government. And so the ideological drivers are not quite the same. The reality is that devolutionary powers in Northern Ireland haven't been exercised to their full extent because of financial limitations, so the immediate ambition to keep the Northern Ireland Social Security System the same as the rest of the UK meant that the Northern Ireland Executive had to meet the expenditure required to sustain particular contributory benefits. The difficulty in Northern Ireland was that there were higher levels of unemployment and so more people are drawing on the social insurance fund and fewer people paying into it and that led to a state of potential bankruptcy for Northern Ireland in the early 20th century and so there had to be financial subvention from the treasury. That meant that in order to maintain parity there were financial limitations and those are the financial limitations that still apply and that really limit ideologically and operationally the devolutionary differences that happen in Northern Ireland. So the lessons that that I can bring from Northern Ireland are how you might seek to manage devolutionary powers within very tight fiscal constraints, so the ambition to do things very differently has to be tempered, of course, by the reality of what that's going to cost. The lessons from Northern Ireland, I guess, are part of it has to come around through inter-governmental agreement. The package of reforms that I think you'd probably be interested in looking at for Northern Ireland are the supplementary payments, the mitigations package, that has been agreed in relation to the welfare reform legislation of 2012, which is for Northern Ireland 2015. That came about through a constitutional cliff edge as so often is faced by Northern Ireland where there was a political impasse and the UK Government agreed that devolved powers would be passed back to Westminster and in return there would be a mitigations package agreed for Northern Ireland that would allow for additional payments to mitigate the worst impacts of welfare reform for Northern Ireland, recognising particular circumstances in Northern Ireland. Without that inter-governmental agreement, it's unlikely that the Northern Ireland Executive could have done what it wished to do in terms of mitigation, so that's, I guess, the first lesson that the UK Government involvement still remains critical. The second lesson is just a more general one that there have been operational variations in Northern Ireland, notwithstanding the drive for parity and the need to maintain symmetry. They are sometimes insignificant and sometimes more significant and they relate as much to the administration of benefits and how that's handled, the culture administration, as much as to the benefits themselves. A lot of working around the edges, particularly in social security, and that's across the piece, not just in Northern Ireland, working around the edges can make quite a difference. You can recognise exceptional needs in particular categories of claimants, for example. You can seek to have adjustments there. Working around the edges to make sure that the operational delivery of benefits is improved, so even though the policy design is effectively the same, you might be able to change the outcome. That's probably where Scotland is at at the moment, looking at the outcome of the reforms that you're hoping to bring in as much as how the policy delivery is going to be considered. What you've seen is that although social security powers are devolved to Northern Ireland, exactly the same as what is in Westminster, Westminster operates these powers and tops up from the Westminster Treasury to Northern Ireland, or am I getting that wrong? Yes and no. In terms of the devolved powers, the devolved powers have always been fully devolved. The process in Northern Ireland has been that we do a karaoke version of the legislation from Britain, so we changed the name to Northern Ireland and we changed the bits and pieces within the legislation, but the face of the legislation remains the same. The history of social security legislation passing through the Northern Ireland Assembly has been an expedited process, so there hasn't been very much scrutiny in part because of political control over committees, so a unionist control committee is less likely to wish to scrutinise in detail because that might lead to differential outcomes or differences in the face of the bill that might upset the objective of a party. The main difference was the welfare reform legislation in 2012 that came to the floor of the assembly that produced quite substantial political differences and came at a time when there were other political issues at play in Northern Ireland. The welfare reform legislation in 2012 started to divide parties along fairly traditional lines and probably the welfare reform legislation acted as the lightning road for a lot of other political issues that were going on at the time. The only way to resolve that was that the legislation got defeated on the assembly. A petition of concern was raised in order to block the legislation from proceeding in May 2015. The only way to get the legislation through was to get the assembly to agree to pass powers to put through the welfare reform legislation along with the welfare reform and work bill. It is a temporary measure. There is a sunset clause on it, and there are some limitations over what Parliament in Westminster can do, but, overall, the devolved powers are now with the Northern Ireland Assembly, or would be with the Northern Ireland Assembly if it was operational at the moment. The subvention, however, continues to come from treasury, and that creates a disincent to do things differently. There is a bit of a heads-eye wind tells you lose situation, so if Northern Ireland creates a bespoke system that generates savings in social security, those savings would be handed back to the Treasury. If Northern Ireland generated a bespoke system that costed extra money, that money would have to be found by the Northern Ireland Executive. The financial incentive to change things is also limited by not just the fiscal limits on what the Treasury will give but on the outcomes of differences that might happen. Thank you very much for that, Professor. Ruth Maguire, you wanted to come in. Thank you for being here. Can we review indulge with it? Maybe we'll come to scrutiny later. Can I ask a different question about cross-border, just based on what Granite said? I just wondered your opinion on who was the best place to take that kind of cross-border view of the interaction between new devolved and reserved powers and what your advice would be to ensure that the interaction between them didn't have unintended consequences? Just to check the borders that I'm talking about, this is Scotland and the rest of GB. Normally when I talk about borders, I talk about the Irish border, so it's a nice change. In terms of, I think that you're talking about scrutiny from the start of the legislation right through to the implementation and the delivery. My view is that there needs to be effective scrutiny of the regulations. Social security regulations is where social security happens, so the primary legislation, I know some of the responses to the bill, have outlined that the legislation is quite bare and that there's very little detail on the face of the bill. That's becoming increasingly normal for social security legislation and the detail is fleshed out in regulations, so you need proper scrutiny of where the regulations are happening and that will apply whether there was a border issue or not. The scrutiny process for regulations in the UK in relation to reserved benefits and in relation to devolved benefits in Northern Ireland is the Social Security Advisory Committee, which will not have a remit to scrutinise devolved powers in Scotland and devolve legislation in Scotland, so that does create a gap. In terms of who might be best placed, we could make the argument that the Social Security Advisory Committee would be best placed, but that's an argument that's gone, that's lost. The amendment to the Scotland Act took care of that very clearly. My proposed arrangement would be that you would have a social security advisory committee-type body for Scotland that would look at scrutinising devolved legislation in Scotland relating to social security and that there would be some degree of connection and co-ordination with the UK Social Security Advisory Committee so that there could be an oversight of where the overlaps were. I think that we're not going to know what those overlaps are at this stage. We don't know what the Scottish devolved legislation will look like, so we don't know where the gaps will happen, but we know that they will happen. I've proposed three potential models for the Journal of Social Security Law. One is that you have a memorandum of understanding with the DWP that would allow some scrutiny by the Social Security Advisory Committee in an advisory capacity rather than on a saturated basis to advise on devolved legislation. That would have a reciprocal arrangement, presumably with an equivalent committee in Scotland. I'm not sure what both Governments' appetite for that would be. The second issue might be to have cross membership, which I think would probably be the most advantageous in terms of being able to ensure that there was cross-fertilisation of the ideas there. Again, that would require intergovernmental agreements, so there's a model for that already. The Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council now defunct had a main UK committee and it had Scottish and Welsh sub-committees, although sadly not a Northern Irish one. That was able to take the issues from Scotland and bring them to the main committee and the issues from the main committee and bring them back to Scotland. That model already exists. It would require again intergovernmental agreement because the joint membership would have to be agreed by both Governments or the overlapping members at any rate. In the interim, the most straightforward solution might be to have good working relationships between a Scottish and a UK advisory committee. That would rely on good chair-to-chair relations. It would rely on using the powers that already exist to invite presentations from Scotland, creating powers for a new committee in Scotland to invite presentations from the main UK circuitry advisory committee to try and understand what the issues are for each committee and to work on co-operation and co-ordination more possible. I think that the circuitry advisory committee has good form on that and I have to stress that I am speaking as a member of the committee rather than as the voice of the committee, but the danger with that is that it falls victim to other statutory requirements. The circuitry advisory committee currently most of its work is done in scrutinising regulations for GB and Northern Ireland. That is the main bulk of the work and if that work is substantial then something else will have to give in order for that statutory commitment to be met. There is a danger there that that might not work as well in practice, as you might hope, but it would be a good starting point to see what a future model would look like. You could test what the co-operation arrangement should be like. You could test to see what the extent of overlap was and the need for that because we do not at this stage really know what that need will be, but you are right to say that there are likely to be unintended consequences that there always are with social security legislation. I think that bringing geographical circumstances into a complex system of assessing need is likely to produce unintended, unforeseen consequences at this point. Your report on dignity and respect says that a commitment to dignity and respect requires certain minimum standards and is an obstacle to the lowering of current standards. I understand from that minimum standards both with regard to how someone is treated by the system, but also that those benefits should support a minimum standard of living, are central to the idea of dignity and respect. I would be interested to know how you feel that we can determine and then protect that minimum standard, especially in terms of the amounts that are paid. Yes, when we looked in the report, this is the report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission that I wrote with two colleagues, Mark Simpson, the lead author and my mother, colleague Professor Anne-Marie Gray, and we were asked to try and figure out what dignity and respect would look like, particularly in legal terms, how you would embed that in a social security system. Dignity we could figure out because there are international human rights agreements that allow us to provide some conception of what dignity might look like. Respect in legal terms is very nebulous, so we did not find anything that would allow us to define respect, but if you get a dignity right and a culture right, you will understand that respect will follow through on that. When we looked at what dignity might involve, we looked at the international standards that already exist. In the briefing paper for this meeting, I have set out some of those standards. In particular, we would recommend that there would be a close look at the international covenant in social, economic and cultural rights. The European Social Charter provides the idea of what a minimum income standard might look like, so very few international instruments will provide a monetary figure. That will be up to—understandably, perhaps, because it is a question for each Government, each executive to figure out for itself, and it will differ depending on location, time frame and everything else. There is nothing really that guides us in terms of a minimum income standard in the international human rights instruments. There are lots of work that is done by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for example, on minimum income standards and what looks like it is necessary to survive, but I think that the value for those articles is that they do not just look to subsistence allowance, they do not look to an absolute definition of poverty, which is that you have a roof over your head, you have enough food to eat. They go beyond that and they say that there is a right to cultural and civic participation in society. It is about living rather than existing and that is what provides the protection for dignity. It is not just a matter of having enough to survive but being able to actively engage in activities that other citizens take for granted, having a cup of coffee, going round for a meal to someone's house. I think that that would fit very well with the idea of a consensual definition of poverty that is led by a co-production model in Scotland, which I think is becoming clear certainly through the responses to the bill, that the idea of a consensual level of poverty, a model to measure that already exists, the poverty and social exclusion surveys, provides an indication of what members of the public think are basic elements for everyday living, and then you prioritise those and you identify that things like two good pairs of winter shoes or a suit for an interview or the ability to take your kids to the seaside for a week, those are things that people now understand as part of daily living and that changes over time. So 20 years ago, nobody would have considered a mobile phone to be necessary but now the poverty and social exclusion survey says that it is necessary. So a monetary figure on its own won't necessarily give you the definition of dignity that I think would be best placed for the Scottish Government to look at in terms of the international conventions and the international human rights instruments. Our recommendation in the report was to embed those international standards into a primary act in Scotland using the same model as the human rights act. So there's already, again, a legislative model there that could work and that would allow you to select what it was that you wished to embed that would provide legal protection for those principles that are in and of themselves. There's not much common law behind them, at least certainly not in Britain and in the UK except Scotland. I'm not familiar enough with Scottish law to be able to state what the common law position on dignity is. Questions are following on from your comments there. It seems as if you would agree then that the upgrading of benefits is absolutely essential to any commitment to dignity and respect. I definitely think that it has to be a consideration because benefit levels are set at a basic floor and the floor itself has fallen while living standards and living costs have increased. The differential between where the benefit levels are at and what costs to live has increased. There is clear evidence that people on benefits have not got access to dignity if that's all the income that they have to survive. We've seen an increase in food banks, for example, when there's lots of research looking at the indignity of having to rely on food banks as an absolute measure of poverty. Again, it's a question for Governments in terms of resource priority, but if you're looking at it purely from a dignity perspective, you'll want to start with what is defined as a minimum income necessary to enjoy the rights of citizens and of citizenship, to be able to feed your family without fear, to be able to meet your rent, to be able to take the kids to the cinema once a month or to do something with them, to be able to enjoy life in the same way. I'd look to those minimum income standards as a guide to what you might wish to set benefit levels at. Northern Ireland seems to have a more extensive set of mitigations against welfare reform than Scotland, most notably around DLA and PIP. Those are set in laws and entitlements rather than being discretionary. I'd just like you to give us some insight into whether you believe that is advantageous. This is part of what was called the fresh start agreement optimistically, which was the political agreement that allowed for the legislative consent motion to pass the devolved powers back to Westminster at the same time as agreeing an additional package to support mitigations in Northern Ireland. The mitigations are a transitional time limited package, so the mitigations that you mentioned in relation to DLA and PIP, there will be a transitional payment for somebody who was on DLA and is transferred to PIP but is unsuccessfully transferred to PIP, so it's not eligible for PIP but would have been eligible for DLA, and there's a transitional payment there to enable them to adjust to the position that they're going to be in in a year's time. As to whether that's been successful, it's too soon to say, but we would say that it's advantageous because it doesn't leave people on a cliff edge in quite the same way and will allow them to look into other possibilities rather than just coming off benefit and then having to figure it out. Those packages of mitigation payments were designed to deal with the impact of welfare reforms, such as the cliff edge whenever you come off DLA and don't get transferred to PIP, but they were agreed by government and they don't come within the benefit cap, so they are supplementary payments. They are additional to benefits that already get paid, and we don't know whether they will survive beyond the four-year period that they are currently scheduled to last, but there are some interesting measures in there and certainly they are worth looking at, and there are things that haven't happened yet that I think will be interesting, such as a cost of working allowance, which will be to offset the universal credit work allowance issue. We hope that they'll be successful. I haven't seen the implementation of them effectively to understand exactly how they're working, and I think that that's something that we're going to have to keep an eye on. Thank you, Adam Tomkins. Thank you, Professor McEva, for joining us this morning. Before I ask my question, I was a member of the Smith commission, which designed the package of welfare devolution that has now been legislated for in the Scotland Act 2016. A Smith commission looked at the experience of Northern Ireland and didn't look at it for very long because we very quickly and I think unanimously realised that it wasn't what we wanted for Scotland at all. The whole point of welfare devolution in Scotland is precisely to enable the two Governments to pursue different welfare policies, different social security policies, if that's what they choose to do, which is the opposite of the constitutional position in Northern Ireland. The package in Scotland is expressly designed with it in mind not to replicate really anything very much about the Northern Ireland experience. With that in mind, however, I am interested in the extent to which the current constitutional settlement in Northern Ireland enables the Assembly Government, when it exists, to pursue different policies from those that are preferred by the UK Government. If we could just flesh that out a bit, that would be helpful. Whether there is any equivalent in the Northern Ireland settlement of the no detriment principle in Scotland, which is, as I understand it, that if the Scottish Government wishes to legislate for welfare benefits to be more generous than they are in the rest of the UK, then that money will have to be found from within the Scottish budget. Vice-aversaure, if the Scottish Government decided to make social security benefits less generous than they are in the rest of the UK, the Scottish budget would keep those savings and wouldn't hand them back to the Treasury. To me, I just wanted to make sure that I am right that the opposite of that is the case in Northern Ireland. Yes. I will go backwards on those questions. There is no detriment principle that we do not have an equivalent. It is probably a grand statement to say that there was a constitutional objective to devolutionary powers in Northern Ireland in 1920. It was a settlement following civil war, so I do not think that the constitutional objection or the constitutional focus was on social security at that time. In 1920, there was not even a welfare state, so it is just how it is evolved. The no detriment principle does not apply in Northern Ireland. We do not have it in our constitutional settlement. We do not have it in the 1998 act following from the Good Friday agreement. If there was a more generous provision provided by the Northern Ireland executive of social security benefits, that would have to be met by the Northern Ireland executive. However, if we provided a system that produced savings, those savings would, in effect, have to be handed back to the Treasury. It is a complex pathway to get to that conclusion, but that is very much what the Treasury position is. If that was to be contested, it would undoubtedly require some complex arguments on both sides. However, the overall conclusion is that that money would be handed back. It would not be kept by Northern Ireland. In relation to how the constitutional settlement allows Northern Ireland to deviate, there is not really any limit on what the Northern Ireland Parliament can do to deviate from social security in Britain. The limit is around fiscal ability. The section 87 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 recognises the symmetry between the two systems and talks about the need to have agreement between the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the Northern Ireland Government to agree the extent to which deviations might happen. However, there is no constitutional imperative that that must maintain parity or that there is no constitutional objection to parity being breached. It is simply around that if Northern Ireland was to create a bespoke system, it would have to agree that it would finance the new IT, the new administration and the additional costs that might come from a benefit system. It would look to all of the implementation issues itself. I do not think that the UK Government has any particular issue with Northern Ireland doing that. I have never seen that raised as a concern by the UK Government. However, we are bound by the fact that we are already relying on subventions from the Treasury and so the financial incentive to change is not there. It is an equivalent in Northern Ireland of our fiscal framework. In our fiscal framework, the UK and the Scottish Governments agreed to share the implementation costs of social security devolutions. There is a payment going from the Treasury to the Scottish Government of £200 million to help the Scottish Government to set up the infrastructure that it needs to develop, devolve social security regimes here in Scotland. There is no equivalent of that in Northern Ireland. To my knowledge, there is now—this is not my area of expertise—but there is, of course, fiscal agreements with the Treasury on how the subventions happen and on what basis they happen. There are three in particular that I cannot think of at the top of my head. I am happy to give the committee more information at a later date, if that is helpful. However, the reading of those provisions is not that the devolutionary powers would be shared, the costs would be shared by the UK Government. The position, as I understand it, is that if Northern Ireland wishes to do it differently, it is free to do so, but it will have to do it off its own bat. I note in the journal paper that you provided us with before the committee that you argued that the role of the social security advisory committee in providing independent advice to the Scottish and UK Governments to ensure coherence across related benefits systems would seem to be required. In relation to that, I have a few questions, if you do not mind. Do you think that a statutory body is necessary for an independent Scottish scrutiny body? What would be necessary for such a body to be effective? Related to that, do you think that the Scottish Parliament should have a role in being a scrutiny body? What is the role of elected representatives in that scrutiny? Take your questions in order. The first is that you have asked whether an independent body would need to be statutory. Things are always better protected in a statutory body than they are on the whim of a Government, so my instinct would be to say yes, that it should be a statutory body, that it would be an arm's length independent body and that its remit would be in some way similar to the social security advisory committee that would have a remit to review high social security works and to review draft legislation. Putting it in a statutory body does protect its independence, because it is not subject to political women in the same way. We have seen the bonfire of the quangos a few years back under the coalition Government and the idea that you can reduce the role of arm's length bodies for some very good reasons and others not so good. Being able to have a statutory remit for a body marks it out as having a particular function that has a particular value. Of course, it can be removed from legislation with the consent of Parliament and the consent of Government, but putting it in legislation puts a clear message that it is a necessary feature of scrutiny, that it has to be an independent body, that it is there for a particular purpose and that it provides additional constitutional comfort to the Parliament to hold the executive to account. It does not have to be in legislation, but I had conceived it in that way because it mirrors the creation of the social security advisory committee. On your question on what is necessary for a body to be effective, it is a really good question. I draw on my experience of the social security advisory committee again, speaking as a member and not the voice of the committee. What I find to be very effective there is the range of expertise that is there, so you have very clear technical expertise from members such as Judith Patterson from CPEG Scotland, for example, who has very clear detailed workings of the regulations and can drill down on the technical detail and understand where the legislation does not fit with other pieces of legislation definitions. The out-workings of how that will play are very clearly identified and the problems are avoided from the outset. The range of expertise is critical. There is a statutory position for the Northern Ireland member, which I hold, and that provides some oversight of where things are different in other areas and allows us to consider issues from different angles. There are positions for people with experience of disability, people with experience of employers and employment, so TUC representatives, for example, have been on the committee in the past. I bring in a range of expertise around—comittees can be very effective, sometimes committees can be ineffective because it is just a whole cacophony of voices, but the effectiveness is about having different input into seeing how this legislation fits with other legislative measures, seeing what the output will be like, seeing how the legislation might be changed in order to avoid unintended consequences to soften the edges. It is absolutely not to have a role in demanding policy change. That is not the business of an independent arm's length body, which I guess takes me to the third point on whether there should be a role for the Scottish Parliament. I take it, do you mean within that committee rather than generally, or perhaps both? I would be interested in your opinions on both. I think that the value for the Social Security Advisory Committee is that it does not have parliamentary members involved in the committee. There is no ideological objective that dominates or has an influence, so that would be my personal view on whether there should be parliamentary representation on an independent advisory committee. I think that the point of independence is that it is independent from government influence and that it is able to make recommendations on the face of the legislation rather than on what policy intent might be preferred. In relation to the scrutiny of legislation by the Scottish Parliament, I think that that has to happen. You have to be able to hold the executive to account, whichever executive exists. It has to happen. The difficulty with the scrutiny of secondary legislation is that you cannot do anything about it. Once the bill or once the draft regulations are laid, you can either accept them or reject them, but you cannot change them. The difficulty becomes that if you like most of what is happening but not all of it, you have a choice to make on whether you reject it through the baby out with the bathwater effectively. I am making an independent committee giving them the power to scrutinise and change the face of the legislation before it is laid. It is probably one of the most valuable things and one of the most effective things that the Social Security Advisory Committee does, but it can change around the edges some of the issues that will affect the implementation. Again, it is looking at the outcome rather than aiming to change the policy process or to change the policy objectives. That means that the legislation that goes before Parliament is more robust and has a better chance of avoiding unintended consequences. The ability of Parliament to scrutinise will be fairly limited because there will be, I imagine, quite a volume of legislation that will flow from devolved powers. In the last parliamentary year, the Social Security Advisory Committee scrutinised 44 pieces of legislation that is at a time when there was not major welfare reform. Most of those were taken through without any major incidents, some of them were very technical, some were quite controversial and some we did go out to consultation on. However, the ability of a Westminster Parliament to scrutinise 44 sets of regulations was limited and it has a second chamber. The Scottish Parliament only has one chamber and so there is a huge burden there on parliamentarians who will not necessarily have the time or the expertise to be able to provide that scrutiny. I think that it provides some constitutional comfort to be able to have an independent body that is independent of Parliament that will advise Parliament and Parliament can choose to take the advice or not to take the advice. That is another matter. It will give a chance for the legislation to be able to deliver the policy intent. That is a trick with legislation. The policy intent might be quite simple. I think that universal credit in particular is a very simple idea. Let's simplify the benefit system so that you just claim one benefit. However, when you go to deliver that, it turns out not to be so simple. Being able to see what the legislation looks like and being able to scrutinise it effectively is the way that the social security system will develop in Scotland and you want to get that right because you do not want to have to keep going back and changing the regulations because that takes more parliamentary time, more scrutiny and so on. The absence of a second chamber is a consideration. It is not that the House of Lords will always throw back a piece of legislation to the commons and refuse to implement it, but it is still an important check and balance on the executive. You want to be able to have that system in place so that the system is protected rather than just being a case of the welfare forms that we are looking at now. The Scottish Government is pleased that we are going to look at principles of dignity and respect, so that we can trust the executive. That may well be the case, but this is going to be a system that you want to endure so that you want to put the position in place now that this is going to last, that it is going to have scrutiny that continues, that allows the executive to be held to account and to deliver the policy intent in the way that it intends to deliver it rather than in an unintended, adverse way. Thank you again for all the information that you have shared so far with us. I wonder if I could get some of your advice in regard to residential issues and entitlement to benefit. If we end up in Scotland where we could end up with differential payments north and south of a border—I mean that in Scotland and England not, but in Ireland context—how would you see that working? For example, if I was to be successful in getting PIP in Aberdeen but then due to work moved to Plymouth, how would that work if I won a higher award? Would you see some kind of inter-government agreement that that would last for a certain period of time? Would I have to reapply for PIP south of a border if I was north of a border? The other thing might work. There may be an older person who is on a 10-inch allowance in Birmingham but because of family reasons he moves to north of a border. Again, the amount of money and the entitlement might be slightly different on rules and regulations. Have you had any experience of how would that work? Is there, in your view, a minimum period of time someone has to have been resident within a country before they can claim an award? I think that when one of the legislation stands, I could live anywhere in the UK and claim the new awards that come out of the Social Security Bill in Scotland. I think that that is a really tough question. I am not sure that I am going to be able to answer it to complete satisfaction in terms of there is some experience in Northern Ireland with moving geographically. Lots of regulations that we scrutinise in the Social Security Advisory Committee will relate to the geography of the GB jurisdiction. We will have to have mirror image regulations for Northern Ireland. That means that there can be a shortfall between moving from Northern Ireland to GB. The way that that has been managed more often than not is through an agreement, an inter-departmental agreement, that if somebody has claimed a benefit in GB and they transferred to Northern Ireland and moved to Northern Ireland, that entitlement can maintain, but it does sometimes take the issue to be raised and for action to be threatened. Perhaps legal action, a pre-action protocol letter, for example, might have to be taken to ensure that that position is addressed and identified. It is not always obvious that people will want to move to Northern Ireland or out of Northern Ireland, but in relation to finding ways to do it, there are inter-departmental ways that can be done. They can be very straightforward, but the straightforward element of that is that the benefit entitlement will be the same in both jurisdictions, both in terms of the provision that has been made and the conditions and criteria for the benefits. It becomes a little bit more complicated, so I am not sure that I know what the answer to your question is in relation to moving from Aberdeen to Southampton on how that interaction might work. If the benefits are the same, it is fine, but if there are two different sets of benefits, there will have to be some protocol arrange that will allow for some certainty for claimants to understand that, if they move, there will be some protection time-limited, perhaps, and probably advisably, that would allow them to move for shorter periods of time and then to return, or to move for a short period of time, decide to stay but have that time to make a new application, if that is required, if it is a different benefit, a different entitlement criteria and a different payment. There are minimum periods of time that relate to geography, that relate to people moving out of GB, moving out of Northern Ireland, particularly we have this in relation to our north-south border, so people who move to a different jurisdiction entirely, a different country, a different legal system, a different benefit system, and we have to have some provision for that because there is a lot of cross-border movement. That tends to be on a time-limited basis, so if you are out of the country for a certain period of time, it might be, depending on what it is, depending on what the benefit is, it might be for four weeks, it might be for housing benefit, it might be for four weeks, but there might be exceptions built in for victims of domestic violence, for example, that might extend to 12 weeks or it might extend for individuals who work overseas, so members of security forces, for example, will have some guidance there on how to model that, but as I say, the difficulty will be that these are two different types of benefits. So you could have a time-limited period that would allow you to carry your Scottish devolved benefit to Southampton, you could maintain that for four weeks or for longer if you were moving forward domestic violence purposes, for example. Sorry, because you were a victim of domestic violence, not for domestic violence purposes. Briefly, would you see that being a regulation or would you see some kind of definition of a principle of this within the heart of the bill? Ideally, you would want to say it in the heart of the bill because the bill will provide the legal certainty that you will look for in terms of dignity and dignity will involve people knowing what their circumstances, what they will be entitled to in the face of changing circumstances, so they will want some degree of legal certainty and some element of the rule of law will apply to that. The difficulty might be that you might put a principle into a piece of legislation that you can't deliver, so there would need to be an understanding that that was something that could be delivered by the Scottish Government, that there would be agreement with sister departments in Northern Ireland or in the rest of the UK that there could be an arrangement to be reached. The way that time-limited periods and periods for continuing to receive benefits while out of the country works for Northern Ireland and for housing benefit purposes, for example, is through regulations, so that would be a way to respond to changing circumstances that you can see that are arising and might be another way to negotiate the differences as they become apparent when the Scottish system develops. What you said earlier to members of the committee about the importance of the social security advisory body is really helpful. You said some other things about scrutiny, and I just wanted to go over this and to make sure that I understood what you said. I am clear about the importance of the social security advisory body and what it could do, but you also went on to say that a memorandum of understanding would be the DWP to let the UK social security have some scrutiny on Scotland's legislation, and you also talked about cross membership through an inter-governmental agreement. I just wanted to understand how they might fit together. Obviously, I suppose that the final element to that is the Scottish Parliament committee system itself having a role in scrutiny and recommendation and policy. Anything that you could add to explain to the committee how you think it all might fit together would be helpful. The memorandum of understanding idea comes from what already exists in relation to the relationship between HMRC and the social security advisory committee. When the social security advisory committee was set up at scrutinised social security benefits that were contained within one department, tax credits came along and HMRC had responsibility for that, but that became something that was important in social security terms to be within a scrutiny provision. The arrangement was reached that there would be a memorandum of understanding with HMRC that the social security advisory committee could review the regulations. It has no power to take them on formal reference, so it is only advisory insofar as the committee's role is advisory, but the memorandum of understanding means that we do not have a statutory power to take the HMRC regulations on formal consultation. If we saw something coming through that we felt was insufficiently supported by evidence, for example, as we have in the past, our options are fairly limited. We do not have the power to say, you should change these regulations. We can talk to officials and that is a very valuable process of working behind the scenes with officials to say, can we look at this again? Can you go back and see if this amendment could be made or if this adjustment could be made? It is a possibility to encourage co-operation. It does not always work, but it is a way to engage two departments that otherwise have very different ambitions. The Department for Work and Pensions' ambitions on benefits is, I think, fair to say, very different from HMRC's ambitions on social security benefits. That is a model that could work to get the two committees together if we assumed that there would be a Scottish version of the social security advisory committee to allow some discussion between the two, some scrutiny role, some interaction to begin to see where the overlaps lie so that one committee could adjust its advice to the UK Government and the other could adjust its advice to the Scottish Government, depending on how those overlaps played out. Of course, that will require inter-governmental agreement, so I am not going to assume that that would happen. I am not going to assume that either Government would be content for that to happen. Cross membership would be that you would have a position on each committee for a member from the other committee, and that position would be presumably a reserved position. The Northern Ireland position, for example, is a statutory position to give insight into what happens in Northern Ireland. It is not an ideal position. If I do not speak for the social security advisory committee, I do not speak for Northern Ireland, so the idea that I can present some difficulty, so the idea of a committee behind that Scottish voice or the committee behind that UK voice, I think, is more helpful and would allow for the chair of a Scottish committee, for example, to have a position on the UK social security advisory committee. Again, there may be some issues around that. The appointments on the UK social security advisory committee are made by the UK minister for work and pensions, so my position is run past the Northern Ireland ministers, but it will ultimately be the decision of the UK minister, and that might not be something that the Scottish Government would wish to entertain, or it might think that it is a quid pro quo, but the quid pro quo would be that on the Scottish committee that position, the reserved position for the UK member, would effectively be someone appointed by the UK Government, by the UK minister. Again, that is where the political difficulty might lie. I do not think that it is insurmountable, but I would not wish to assume again that that agreement would be there. The third option was to have two parallel committees that would have some more informal arrangement between them to keep in touch with each other and to co-ordinate and co-operate on a more informal basis. That could be accommodated within the work that the social security advisory committee currently does. For example, at our last meeting, we had a presentation from the Northern Ireland department on issues affecting Northern Ireland, and that is a standard. We did a stakeholder visit to Scotland, and we are due to go to Wales this year and been to Northern Ireland before that. I think that there is form there for the social security advisory committee to take account of what is happening in Scotland and to adjust its recommendations on that basis. We have a customary position at the moment, so it is by custom and practice that we have a Scottish member. In fact, we have two Scottish members, Dr Jim McCormack, who is the other member from Scotland, along with Judith Patterson. That is helpful. We have a position for Wales, but it is just being able to see that those members from the other devolved areas can bring that expertise to it. It is much easier to bring it from a committee that is looking at this in Scotland than it would be just for an individual to have their own insight into what is happening. Is that helpful? The cross membership would relate to the social security advisory body. In other words, it would be someone from each Parliament on the corresponding committee to get some. To each committee? The committee would be an arm's length body, so it would not be the parliamentary committee, which reminds me that you asked about the role of the parliamentary committees on that. They would be arm's length bodies, so they would not be the parliamentary committee. I am not proposing that a member of the social security committee would go and sit in the work and pensions committee. That is a whole different ball game. I am not even going to get into that, but I think that there is a role for this committee to scrutinise legislation. Certainly, this committee and its predecessor has very good form on investigating the impact of welfare reform. There is some really valuable work that has been done there, but I worry about your capacity to do it because there are going to be so many issues with welfare reform. There are going to be so many issues with the devolved benefits that I think your plate is going to be pretty full and the ability to provide detailed technical scrutiny of the draft regulations might have to be considered. Certainly, the recommendation that we made in the report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission was that that should be kept under close scrutiny itself because it may well be that the committee becomes overwhelmed and therefore is not able to discharge that duty. Having said that, I think that there is a very clear role for the Scottish committee to be able to understand what is developing and so you could take evidence from a social security advisory committee from the UK as well as the Scottish social security committee to be informed on that. The other aspect of the social security advisory committee is that it has a remit to do independent research, so that is its other statutory function. If that was a similar statutory function in a Scottish body, that might work very well with your remit so that you would identify issues that would be of value to this committee for that advisory committee to look at. We speak to officials and to lots of stakeholders and to Government ministers to identify what we think would be useful to look at in our independent work programme, so there might be additional complementarity between the parliamentary committee and the independent committee that would scrutinise regulations. In that research and information, that can be shared with the parliamentary committee. Before I bring Mark Griffin in, you were talking about obviously committees. We have had meetings with the Scottish Affairs Committee. We have been here and we have been at Westminster. It is in tension of this committee and theirs to meet again. Would you say that that would be a good way to air the issues in regard to what is obviously devolved to Scotland and reserved to the Westminster? That could iron out, hopefully, anyway, some obstacles. Would you say that that was still a good way to go ahead? I do not know much about politics. I am an academic, so that is my game, but it always seems to me that talking behind the scenes seems to achieve quite a lot and certainly that has been the experience in the Social Security Advisory Committee that the head-to-head of the ministers is where the bold statements happen but the hard work that is done behind the scenes where you can agree with individuals on the extent to which changes can be made and the extent to which agreement might be reached. I think that that political process would be very helpful in being able to understand what the issues are and how the resolutions might be agreed and to come to compromises where that is possible on that issue of script date over the border and how that would work. On the mitigation package that was a good cradjust ask, my understanding is that the Northern Ireland executive came to a policy decision and then it was passed to the DWP to implement that operationally, is that correct? No, in terms of the supplementary payments and mitigations that Northern Ireland had, the political agreement was reached with the UK Government that there would be a mitigations package that was then handed to a working group chaired by Professor Eileen Evison, who, working with other members, identified a set of mitigation measures that she thought would be effective in mitigating the impact of welfare reform. Those recommendations were put to the executive, the executive agreed them, and the implementation now falls to Northern Ireland. For the most part—sorry, I'll correct myself—the implementation, the legislation to implement the mitigations package for the most part falls to DWP because of the legislative consent motion, but there are some of the mitigations that will not be possible for DWP to implement, so we are still awaiting some mitigations in relation to universal credit, for example. The mitigations relating to the legacy payments have been implemented by DWP, others will have to have the assembly approval, so we are in a bit of a tight spot because we don't have an assembly, but those powers will pass back to the assembly if and when the assembly is restored so that it will be up to Northern Ireland to implement those measures if they are still outstanding. The delivery is through the Department for Communities, so the Department for Communities will be the body that will be implementing the supplementary payment system and advising on how the claimants can access those payments and the implications of that access. You think that that is the right way to go for the Scottish Government to say, for example, the power is overtop up or the power to create a new benefit, that it would be advisable for the Scottish Government to pursue those administratively on their own as well rather than say contract or tender to DWP to implement those? My instinct is to say yes because part of what we identified in the report on dignity and social security was that it is not just about what you put in the face of a piece of legislation, it is about cultural changes and cultural shifts in attitudes. The work that has been done by my colleague Dr Mark Simpson looks at the cultural differences between different areas of social security administration. The ability in Northern Ireland to sanction less seems to be partly around a culture that is quite Northern Ireland specific about not wishing to rock the boat and not necessarily sanctioning because there may be other ramifications, which I hope will not apply in Scotland, but I have also been able to communicate more readily and effectively with claimants so that they can understand what their behaviour is to help them to avoid sanctions or breaching other conditions or falling a file of application processes. If you are going to devolve the legislation, it would make sense to keep the devolved administration involved in that process. It has been more effective in Northern Ireland than handing that administration back to DWP, but that is a view that is informed by attitudes rather than a constitutional position on who should administer the benefits. On the flexibilities around universal credit, how simple is that process going between Governments of agreeing those flexibilities and administrating them? Here, we have had some legislation around the payments directly to landlord, but there seems to be a bit more technicalities around payments, which is something that I think the Government and Parliament would be minded to go ahead with, but there seems to be some debate about technicalities around being able to implement that. What is the situation being in Northern Ireland? The situation in Northern Ireland is that we have not yet introduced universal credit. You have got me a week too soon. We introduced it in the 27th of September, so we have not seen how those technical details will play out, but social security has just been doubled by technical difficulties. If you were to be concerned about technical difficulties and social security, you would not do anything. I do not mean to make light of the situation. I think that you are right that there are lots of difficulties. I know that the Work and Pensions Committee was taking evidence yesterday on universal credit and difficulties for payments reaching landlords, so I think that there are difficulties and I do not underestimate how much work will be involved to overcome those difficulties. It is a worthwhile endeavour to do it, because I think that that will make a difference to the experience of universal credit for many payments, and so there has to be something that should be done. We do not yet have the experience in Northern Ireland of how it is going to work out. We are already having some difficulties in terms of recognising identity certificates. For Northern Ireland citizens under the Northern Ireland Act, you can have an Irish passport or a British passport or both, but DWP, if you put in an Irish passport, does not work so well because DWP does not pay benefits to Irish citizens, except that it does in Northern Ireland. We have already seen some of the glitches that are happening, and they just have to be worked through. I do not know what the solutions to those more difficult questions about split payments and so on will be. The legislation is there and we have not tested it, so perhaps in a year's time I will come back with some solutions, but I do not know. Thank you very much, Professor McEva. I was going to ask about the advisory committee, but you have given a very fuel explanation of your involvement to other questions. Once again, thank you very much for taking the time and the evidence that has been excellent. Next item is agenda item 4. It is a report back from Ben MacPherson on MeCop workshop. Ben, do you want to start? Thank you, convener. On 29 August, I attended a workshop along with users of MeCop, which stands for a minority ethnic carers of older people project, which is based in my constituency with the ethos of working in partnership with carers, the voluntary and statutory sectors. MeCop actively seeks to challenge the dismantled barriers that deny black and minority ethnic carers access to health, social work and other social care services in Edinburgh, the Lothians and further afield. We discussed, as is detailed in the committee papers, a number of aspects of the social security bill. First of all, the concept of the principles was discussed, and I should note that all discussions took place in Cantonese and were translated. From the attendees, there was general support for the principles. However, it was agreed that, in the current system, it can be extremely difficult for those who do not speak English to access information on benefits or speak to officials over the phone and also challenges around making use of IT facilities and are often reliant on support workers to help them because of language barriers. Therefore, an additional principle regarding equity of access was suggested, i.e. equal access to information advice and to be able to apply for benefits. It was also suggested that there should be specific help and support made available for non-English-speaking communities, so essentially equal access to information concerning sections 1E and F, for example, of the bill. We then went on to discuss the charter, and there was a general agreement—a strong agreement, I would say—that the charter is a good idea. There was support for the reports that are detailed in the charter, so agreement that the annual report should be honest, sufficiently detailed and publicly available. It was suggested that, as principles can be difficult to pin down, it would be helpful to have a concrete set of standards underpinning each one. There was also discussion about the fact that engagement in the charter, both in its creation and its on-going scrutiny, was important. There was a suggestion made at an expert panel, perhaps like the Scottish Government's experience. Panels could be set up to assess whether the principles in charter are working in practice, and panels could be set up for different communities. Otherwise, it could be difficult for people to access if English was not their first language. The next item of discussion was the rules. Again, there was general support for the rules, but the point was raised again that effort will need to be made to make sure that those in non-English-speaking communities are aware of them. Attendees suggested that support organisations such as MECOP could play a role in helping to support that. A discussion then took place on the certain benefits that are being devolved and included in the bill. A particular discussion on funeral payments was suggested that a quicker and more efficient system and decision-making process is needed to make things easier for people during such a difficult time. On cold weather payments, there was a suggestion that the temperature at which the cold payment is triggered could be looked at as elderly people are more susceptible to the cold and therefore have higher heating costs. It was also suggested again that it could be offered to those with chronic illnesses and mobility issues. In terms of short-term assistance, most attendees agreed that short-term assistance is a good idea and that it should not have to be paid back once a decision regarding a claimant's benefits has been made, so no repayment, for example. In general, it should be a quick, efficient, accurate decision-making process across the different aspects so that there is less need for that kind of assistance to be supplied. Lastly, given that the participants were carers, there was very strong support and agreement among the attendees about the proposed increase in the carers allowance. A suggestion was made that financial help should be available for the period immediately after someone's caring responsibility ends in order to provide a cushion thereafter. Lastly, it was not necessarily related to the bill but, in order to make an accurate summary of the discussion, issues were also raised about carers allowance and the state pension, which is, of course, a reserved matter. There are differences around how carers allowance and the state pension—the relationship between them—wants to claimant reaches state pension age, which is an idea that has not been raised elsewhere. I hope that that provides insight into the important and interesting discussion that took place. Thank you very much, Ben. It is an excellent piece of work that has been done there, particularly in the instances of one benefit and pinning on another, such as pensions. It is something that has certainly been raised in various older people's groups. Does anyone want to ask Ben any further questions about the work that was carried out? No? Okay. Thanks very much, Ben. Thank you. Agenda item 5 is Alison. Do you want to report back from your workshop? Yes. I attended a coalition of carers event on 30 August as a rapporteur for the committee, and I am going to report back on some of the issues that were raised on that day. Chris Boyland, who is the Government lead official on the bill, presented an overview of the bill. The many attendees raised various issues, and I am just going to quickly update you on what they were. There was discussion on the balance between primary and secondary legislation. I fear that regressive changes could be made too easily, as in current UK legislation. There was a recognition that we needed to have a robust scrutiny procedure, including a Scottish version, perhaps, of the Social Security Advisory Committee. There was a concern about principle 7, the principle that the system should be value for money. They were concerned about how you define that value for money could perhaps open the door to cuts and prioritisation of efficiency over rights. They felt that anti-poverty is a principle that the social security system should actively work to reduce poverty, and that should be a key factor in any system. There was a lack of clarity on rights in charter and that the section on charter does not clearly explain what people can expect and their ability to seek redress if their rights are not respected. They would like to see an explicit commitment on the face of the bill that the private sector should not have a role in the system. There were concerns raised about mandatory reconsideration 2, worries that this could discourage appeals to tribunal, as is the case with the UK procedure. They also asked that people should not have to repay overpaid benefits and for some clarity around that. On the issue of the carers allowance increase, as Ben Macpherson pointed out, they were pleased that there was to be an increase, but there was a view that the increase to GSA level does not reflect the value of the care that it provides, because it effectively provides £2 an hour for a 35-hour week. They also raised the issue that carers allowance does not currently allow people to claim more support of the care for more than one person. The 35-hour care rule also means that many carers cannot get the benefits that they could be caring for 34 hours. There was discussion about whether different amounts should be looked at for different caring responsibilities, and they wanted carers allowance schedules to address those issues, but it was very interesting. Dain was pleased to attend. Thank you very much, Alison, for the excellent report back as well. Certainly in some of the round table discussions, the carers allowance is about the working limit, and also when they get to a certain age, it was raised in some of the round tables. I think that it is something that the committee will have to look at as well. Any questions for Alison on the report back? Our next item on the agenda is agenda item 5. I am sorry, I have missed the talk part. I am looking just now at the Auditor General. We have to spend the meeting for a couple of minutes until the Auditor General takes a seat. We now reconvene the meeting on agenda item 5, so I am so secure with the bill, and we are here from the Auditor General. I just want to thank you very much, and I don't think that you have been very busy today with another committee, and I am straight from that. You want to make some opening remarks on the Auditor General. First of all, thank you for inviting us. It is always a pleasure to be here with you, and I will make sure that my opening remarks are very brief. I know that your time is short. We have published a briefing paper in May that pulls together the lessons learned from a range of work that we have done on previous IT projects and lessons from elsewhere around the world, which we hope will be useful for you in your consideration of this issue. In that paper, we identified a number of common themes that have experienced difficulties in digital programmes, which we have grouped in a set of five principles. They cover planning, governance, users, leadership and strategic oversight and assurance. I think that it is important for us to be clear that those principles cannot be considered in isolation. They do interact with each other. Alongside them, we have pulled out throughout the briefing the importance of skills and experience as a cross-cutting theme that is critical to success. It is worth noting that, alongside that briefing paper, we also published in March this year the latest in our series of audits on the way that the Government is implementing its new financial powers, of which social security is obviously a very important element. One of the key messages in that report was that, in many ways, moving into the social security powers is a step up in terms of complexity and scale of what they are trying to do, and that there are some real challenges still to be tackled. Things have moved on since we published that report in March and we will be publishing a second report, a further report in spring 2018, which will look at progress since our report this year in the way that it is planning and organising to deliver the social security responsibilities, in particular the governance and leadership arrangements and the plans for developing the IT systems, and we will also be looking at the costs and the progress achieved to date. Mark Taylor and Morag Campsy, who are with me here today, have been heavily involved in both those pieces of work, and we will do our best to answer your questions. Thank you very much, Auditor General. I know that the excellent reports that you have produced in the committee have them here and look forward to the further report, as you say, how we go forward. My opening question would basically be what are the lessons that you think should be taken in account when we are designing the social security IT system? I think that in broad terms, one of the important things that we pull out in our digital briefing is the importance of getting some of the planning in very early. Whether that is planning for the scale of what the system needs to do, planning to have the right skills and experience in place, or planning for the right governance arrangements, very often when we look at a system that has not gone as planned, it is right at the early stages that we see the roots of the problems, whether we are talking about the Police Eye 6 Scots system, the NHS 24 system. I think that starting early is the key thing that we would be keen to see in place. Morag might want to add to that as a person who led on the digital briefing work for us. As Auditor General said, the planning is key in getting the right people involved from the start. Having integrated teams right at the start involving policy, service design and digital experts is also important. We have seen in the past that, especially when there has been complex policy areas involving an IT problem, sometimes the policy can be designed and we find that it is not very easy to then design a system to meet those outcomes. That is very important. As well, which will be key, is taking into consideration that there is as many benefits to come online and there may be others in the future. Developing a system that is future proof, if you like, that is easy to be changed as you go along, is also key. Governance arrangements are always critical and making sure that you have the right level of skills and understanding at all levels of governance is critical. I am certain that the committee has met both sides together from Westminster and the Scottish Parliament. They seem to be getting along very well and doing quite a good job, but I have other members who want to ask questions. Ben Macpherson, you want to come in. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Auditor General. Good morning all. I think that what is interesting about the paper, as it starts off with the planning clarity around the need for thorough and effective planning, has also been raised today along with the concept of design. In one of my other responsibilities as a member of the sub-committee on policing, we looked at the March 2017 paper that you produced on I6. One of the important lessons that came from that was the paragraph 15 on the difference between the waterfall method and the agile method of IT systems in terms of developing distinct phases. For clarity for the rest of the committee, the waterfall method is where software is developed in distinct phases, each leading to the next phase in a sequence resembling a waterfall. That creates potential for if one phase is not delivered then the next phase is stalled, whereas the agile development system is a more flexible incremental approach where the teamwork is on a small-scale launch of a function product, is the wording in your report. I know that that is quite technical, but I just wanted to raise it as an issue, because to me it was the stand-out point in the I6 review, and I think that for the benefit of getting this right for social security, it is one that is worth raising. I just wondered if you agreed and what your thoughts were on that. Yes, absolutely, Mr McPherson. I hope that one of the themes that comes through in the digital briefing is that sense that although it can be tempting to think about a big bang approach that aims to tackle the whole of a big problem all at once, our experience and experience from other projects elsewhere suggests that increasingly it is much more important to break it down into manageable chunks and to be thinking about how you can build from a good start on to the things that matter in future, particularly in this case, as Mauregg has said. As we know, the existing benefits that are within scope will come on over time, and there is always a possibility of further changes to the devolution settlement in the context that we are all working in. I think that that is increasingly possible with project management approaches such as agile and the way that technology is changing with much more development being done through rapid prototyping and the development of apps that do particular things, but that interact with each other. I think that it is also important to be clear that, if that is the approach that you are taking, you need to be building that in at the beginning in terms of your options appraisal, the procurement options that you consider and, again, the skills and experience that you have. Mauregg will want to expand, but we have seen examples of people starting to use agile without fully understanding what the implications of that are and, again, having to sort of back up and start again. Right. Agile has been using quite a lot more in the public sector, so we are seeing that happen. It is likely that agile will be used. There may be parts of the programme that will use more traditional methods because you can tweak things and see which is the best fit for what you are trying to deliver. What will be key is setting up the procurement stage and making sure that everything is in place to align to whatever methodology is being used. Again, I come back to the governance arrangements quite often. We have seen in the past when agile has been used. The governance boards may not fully understood the agile methodology. What will be key is setting out clearly where decisions are going to be made and what the speed decisions need to be made at, because that is always a critical feature of agile. Being clear about where decisions will be made and who is making those decisions, who is responsible for that, will be a factor as well. Like I6, to an even greater extent in terms of complexity, in terms of using DWP data and existing systems, is an agile approach that is almost essential in your review because of the need to be agile to the sheer complexity and differentiation in the data and systems that are going to be inherited or built upon in terms of delivering the new benefits within a new IT structure? The Scottish Government is still thinking through what method to use for what piece of the programme is. I would not say that one would be better than the other. It is just what is key that is thought through and planned and the right processes and arrangements are put in place to manage that and scrutinise the activity as well to make sure that everything is being delivered. Adam Tomkins. Good morning. Yesterday, the Finance Committee on which I sit took evidence from the bill team and from other officials from the Scottish Government about the financial memorandum associated with the bill. The Finance Committee will report to the committee in due course, but it is fair to say that there were a number of concerns, not all of which were resolved yesterday, about some of the numbers used in the financial memorandum and, in particular, and relevantly to today's proceedings concerns about the figure of £190 million that is used in the financial memorandum in connection with the IT costs. How do you think that we should treat that figure? I think that there are two things to say and I will ask Mark to come in shortly. The first is that I know one of the areas for discussion yesterday was the relationship between the figures in the fiscal framework agreement for funding new devolved powers, including social security and the figure in the financial memorandum. We reported in our March 2017 update on new financial powers about the way in which the figures in the fiscal framework had been reached. It is clear from the documentation that is available that they were not intended as an estimate of the costs. They were a contribution that the UK Government is making to the Scottish Government's costs, so it is important to get that on the record, first of all. The second is the quality of the estimate that is in the financial memorandum. It is entirely appropriate that the committees of the Parliament subject those to proper scrutiny. We have seen examples in the past where those figures have not stood the test of time as a policy has developed and the new services and new agencies have been put in place. What we will be auditing as part of our continuing work is the basis on which those estimates have been developed and how they are standing up against experience as the work rolls out. I will ask Mark to come in here as the person who has led that work on new financial powers so far. When we reported back in March, one of the things that we were clear about was the need for the Government to develop its thinking to an extent that it was able to assess the costs that it was expected to require, recognising the link between decision making. Some decisions are still to be made, some approaches are still to be determined and how that would affect the overall cost figures. We are clear that there is a need to establish a benchmark for the costs. There is a need for Government to manage against that benchmark on an ongoing basis, but we also recognise that, as decisions are made, things happen, so there is a need to refine that and keep that under review. One of the things that we will be picking up as we look to our new piece of work is how that is played out in practice. One of the things that is apparent is that the Government has moved things on since we last spoke, and some of that work has been reflected in the estimates that have gone into the financial memorandum. As the auditor general says, I think that there is still a lot more work to be done around the costs that all this will incur. Importantly, the management against those and the value that is delivered out of that spending ultimately. How are we to understand that £190 million figure? The answer that you are giving, correct me if I am wrong, is that we should understand it as a benchmark. How has the benchmark been arrived at? Why is it £119, not £150 or £390 or anything in between? Given that we do not yet know very much about the agency, we do not know where it will be, we do not know how many offices it will have, we have been given estimates of its annual running costs, we have been given estimates of its eventual staff size. We do not know anything very much about the extent to which the new devolved benefits will be automated. Pauli McNeill has a question in the chamber later on today about that. We might know a bit more about some of these things on Tuesday when the Minister for Social Security gives her next statement to the Parliament that might touch on a number of these issues, I do not know, I have not seen it. Given all of the things that we know we do not know, how reliable is this £190 million figure? It is a very good question and I think it is when you genuinely need to direct colleagues in government. I am looking at our report on developing new financial powers from March. One of our key recommendations was that the Government needed to model more detailed costs, develop its plans and time scales for the implementation of the social security powers. At the time that we carried out that audit work, there was not enough for us to be able to comment on the robustness of the working assumptions that were in place. That was six months ago now. The figure in the financial memorandum will have a basis in the work that has been done in the Scottish Government. I think that it is entirely appropriate for Parliament to test that through its committees with the Government. Our work will do that when we report back next spring. We are not in a position yet to give you that assurance. You are not in a position to give us any assurance at all that this figure is robust. This is work that we have to try to discover ourselves by asking the right questions of the right ministers at the right time. The audit work that we did at the beginning of this year was looking at the Scottish Government circumstances at that time. At that time, we did not feel that the modelling of costs was detailed enough for us to be able to comment on it, and we recommended that it needs to go further. How can we know that this figure—my final question—is how can we know that this figure? I do not mean to be pejorative, but how can we know that this figure is anything more than just a guess? What the committee here and the finance committee can do at this stage is to ask the Government about the basis on which the £190 million figure is put together with the assurance that we will be looking at that as part of our audit work and reporting back on it in May 2018. I have been plowing through all the lessons to be learned on ICT management, and there are many. It seems to me that you do not really need to be ICT literate, but what is a common thread throughout is just basic management principles. You have one team, you talk to each other, there is governance and all that, and you have the end-users involved in it. In terms of the evidence that we have heard from the minister, Jane Freeman, a lot of that has already been planned for. We have 2,000 people who have a panel that the end-users can input to the system. One of the things that I picked up was that, in some cases, the use of short-term contracts in some cases led to problems with the ICT management systems. Would it be your view that the Government should learn some lessons from that and, of course, who they employ? I do not know if you are able to comment on whether you think that we have the expertise, because the size of the project is probably bigger than anything that I have read about so far. I am absolutely right about the scale and complexity. One of the continuing themes in our work on digital programmes has been about the importance of the right skills and experience and, very often, the lack of them or the poor use of them. I know that the Scottish Government's digital directorate has been working hard to fill both the short-term gaps and to develop longer-term capacity in Government and across the public services. I think that the chief information officer has recently written to the Public Audit Committee to update them on that. I understand that you may have a copy of it. It is certainly in the public domain and we can talk a bit more about it this morning if that would be helpful. It is also entirely appropriate, I think, for big programmes to make some use of contractor staff. Those projects do have a sort of big hump of workload that needs to be accommodated and having staff in post to do that all the time would not be a good use of constrained public money. One of the things that we often see, though, is that those teams are not being well integrated with the programme and policy staff, and, as Morach has said, that is critically important. Secondly, they are not being good plans for transferring their knowledge and experience in general, but particularly of the system that they are developing to the staff who will take on long-term responsibility for it. I think that the two things about planning from the beginning about what skills and experience you will need rather than trying to bring them on board in a rush because of very tight timescales. Secondly, planning for how you will transfer their experience back into the permanent staff are the two things that make that a good way of working rather than an additional risk in something that is already big and complex. Just a follow-up. I appreciate that you might not be able to answer this, and it is a bit of a hot potato about where the new agency would be located, so I am not trying to draw you into that. Given the size of the project, as you said, there is planning at the early stages, which would be now, and then there is the establishment of the agency itself. Presumably, the planning and the management will go into the start date as well. Does it matter where it is located in the sense that where you might draw your skills from at that point? In some ways, that decision is a policy decision, and that is one that I am therefore precluded from commenting on for good reasons. However, you are absolutely right. I would expect that, when the Government is making decisions, it will be thinking about where it will have access to the skills that it needs, and also about interactions with other parts of the public sector. Mark May wants to comment on that, given his thinking on the broader social security programme. I think that the short answer is that there is a range of factors in that decision, and that one of the policies that the decision that the Government makes to make is how to balance those range of factors, whether it is access to skills and access to workforce, and it is one of the number of factors that I am sure it will be considering in its overall decision. That is fine. Thank you very much. You have highlighted the complexity of the whole scenario, and we have highlighted that as a committee as well, because there is not a big red button. I cannot press it. I have said that on numerous occasions. People just want to know when their benefit money gets in their account and they want to see a seamless transition from one to the other. To get it right, I have looked at your report here that you have from May and your five principles for success. It is a handy be infographic in page 5. Having worked in the real world in an industry that loved infographics, if you did not necessarily read them all the time and abide by them, I would just ask it in your dealings and expertise on that. Have the Scottish Government worked towards currently the five principles that you have set out here so that when it comes to the day we do not have any issues? I would say that it is working in progress. We produce this briefing paper, as I think the committee knows, because we have reported on a number of different IT programmes that have not succeeded to varying degrees of importance. We thought that in terms of helping people to learn from that, pulling it together would be useful. I know that the Government is taking this very seriously. The Scottish Government has recently given evidence to the Public Audit Committee on the progress that it is making in the underlying changes that are needed to be able to do this better. Equally, we all recognise that there is no quick fix. We continue to look at the specific programmes that we audit at the way that they are being delivered. We very much welcome this committee's early interest in how that is going. I am also very conscious that, as Ms McNeill said earlier, often the things that go wrong are the common sense things that you would expect to be there all the time. Human beings and organisations are not perfect. Things do not work as planned. It is often the softer things around culture, around leadership that make the biggest difference. The reason for the reports that we have produced so far are first of all recognising that progress is happening, but also recognising the complexity and scale of this. As you have said, the potential to have real impacts on people's lives and often the most vulnerable people in Scotland. You said in previous programmes that everything happened early on at the planning stage. From what we have seen, there seems to be an openness from the Government to say right, we need to get this right at this stage. Do you believe that there has been the correct interaction with different organisations, like you have already said, both in-house and externally, to try and make sure that we have addressed that situation? In the March report on the new financial powers, we talk about the good start that has been made, but I think that all I can do really is to reflect again, first of all, the unprecedented scale and complexity of this. Secondly, that even starting as early as the Government can start, the timescales are still short. That is unavoidable given the timescales that have been agreed for the transfer of powers, but there is no doubt that this is a very significant challenge for government. The complexity is the fact that we have already heard that it is over about three or four different computer systems that do not talk to each other, plus that some of them are on a manual system and some on a disclosed place down south. That adds to the complexity in trying to get all that together. At this stage, do you believe that the Scottish Government has stuck with the five principles but made sure that it is working towards making sure that we do not have the difficulties at a later date, because of the sheer complexities in the fact that the information, the data alone, is a major issue? With the caveat that I used in my answer to Mr Tomkins earlier, we said in the March report that we thought that it had made a good start with it, but the sorts of examples that you are talking about highlight how complex it is. Until we have done the next round of audit work, I do not feel that I can give much more assurance about what we are seeing. Mark, is there anything that you want to add in that context? I think that the one thing that I would add is that what we saw in March and what we have seen since then is a commitment from the programme to learn lessons from other systems. So we talk a little in the March report about that, and I know that information has been shared with you since then about the number of organisations that the Government has spoken with to understand and learn those lessons. We are optimistic about that, but yet to be convinced. The theme of the needs to ensure that we have the correct skills and experience and expertise is coming up time and time again. I am just wondering how much scoots I think we as a committee need to place on that, because while we are discussing principles and relationships with the UK Government and so on, if that is not delivered properly, it will have devastating consequences for millions of people. I wonder whether you could elaborate a little on where you believe that we are at the moment. The Scottish Government will be making more payments in a week than it currently does in a year. How do we make that leap and ensure that it is made successfully? There is no simple one answer to that. It might be helpful if I talk you through what we will be looking at in our audit work, because I suspect that there will be strong parallels with what you will be interested in as a social security committee. We will be looking closely at the plans that the Government is putting in place, both the overall programme and the detailed plans for the individual workstreams within that, and testing them to make sure that we think that they are realistic, that the interdependencies are taken account of, that they are doable within the capacity of a civil service that is smaller now than it was 10 years ago and where there are a number of other pressures on people's times for good and well-known reasons. We will be looking at the way in which they are modelling the costs of what they are intending to do and thinking about not just the costs of this programme but where it sits within the overall financial envelope as we move into a new world, where the Scottish Government will be raising about half of what it spends with the associated volatility and uncertainty that comes with that. We will be looking critically at the people aspect, both the leadership of it and the extent to which people are making choices about priorities and working those through their plans, but also making sure that the right people with the right skills are in place and are being supported to do what is needed on a long-term basis. One of the factors that we are very conscious of around the CAP Futures programme, which has been another big area of interest for us, is the long-term strain on people as they have been trying to recover from the situation that became apparent a couple of years ago. There is a huge commitment being shown that is admirable and should be recognised, but it is not a way that you can expect people to work indefinitely. Equally in this programme, we know that people are going to be working very hard to meet the 2021 timescale for full transfer. People need to be thinking both about having the right skills in place and also making sure that that is developing a workforce that can do that longer-term and be building expertise and experience over that period, rather than running the risk of burning people out to meet very short timescales. We do not see any evidence that is happening now, but it is one of the things that we will be looking for again, that sense of sustainability as we look ahead. I have just been around too long, both in local government and in NHS. We have lots of reports of lessons learned, and yet we seem to always fall back and often make the same mistakes. I think that all parts of local and national organisations and other organisations how we do save the best way for this committee to scrutinise us to make sure that we do not make the same mistakes that have been made in previous projects. Is there something in Demet within local and national government that makes this happen, or is it something that also happens within the private sector as well? Starting with your last question first, because it is the easiest one. I think that there is no doubt that it happens in the private sector as well as in the public sector. We have all seen both very visible failings in banking over the past few years and read the articles that suggest that most banks still have a deficit to make up in terms of the robustness and the resilience of their IT systems that we all depend on daily. That is not by any means just about the public sector, and the skills that are needed are in scarce supply right across the economy. In terms of what this committee might be looking for, I am not sure that there is very much that we can add to the answer that we have given to Ms Johnston a moment ago. Other than to say that I think that perhaps starting to develop some clear sort of shared expectations with government about what you are interested in and the frequency with which they will be sharing that information with you is a good starting point. With the sort of backup that we will be reporting regularly on this, actually at a couple of points a year, one in the spring update on the new financial powers more generally and we know social security will be an increasingly big part of that. Secondly, in the annual report I do on the Scottish Government's accounts which pulls out significant things that have come out of the audit each year which tends to be in the autumn, the next one is due towards the end of this month early October. You will be getting assurance from us twice a year about the problems that we are seeing but I think agreeing with government what you expect to see and how they will provide that with you on a regular basis, not so frequent that you are constantly pulling it up by the roots to have a look but regularly enough that you would pick up signs if things were going off track before it was too late to do anything about it, I think would be a good starting point for this committee's scrutiny.