Public Audit Committee 17 December 2025
We highlight it in the report as an area that the Scottish Government needs to pay more attention to in terms of strengthening the controls and approval arrangements for agency staff. Richard Smith has looked at this area closely, so I will bring him in shortly. However, to address your points directly, we do not think that it is a common occurrence; our testing suggests that it is an isolated example.
The Scottish Government view as we went through the audit process is that the arrangement, although expensive, could be justified because of the nature of the skills that the person had, which were not able to be sourced in the market. It concerned work on a particular scheme that the committee will have some familiarity with to do with the post-European Union exit arrangements. They were providing expertise, in part to mitigate the potential for fines that the Scottish Government might have incurred through that part of the post-EU exit arrangements.
Our interest is that we do not think that there was sufficient oversight of the arrangement at very senior levels within the Scottish Government. We draw a contrast with some of the arrangements that take place within Government for the use of consultancy, whereby approval at higher levels of seniority is required. That is our assessment, and we are pleased—I will bring in Richard Smith to discuss it in more detail—that the Scottish Government has accepted our recommendation on the point. We do not think that it is a common occurrence, but the scale of expenditure that took place on the transaction is noteworthy.