Meeting of the Parliament 04 September 2025
I apologise for not being able to be present in the chamber for this debate. I intend to keep my remarks brief, as Douglas Lumsden outlined perfectly the many failings that are identified in the Public Audit Committee’s very well-written report on the Water Industry Commission for Scotland.
It is worth noting that this debate comes only a week after the Scottish Environment Protection Agency issued an alert warning that six areas of Scotland now face significant scarcity, with several areas in the Highlands and Islands region facing moderate scarcity and alerts. Although I appreciate that prolonged periods of drought are not things that this Government can control, fears about access to water in some of the most rural parts of Scotland are not helped when my constituents simultaneously hear that the people in charge of Scotland’s water have received taxpayer-funded bonuses on top of already good salaries and that the regulator that is supposed to have oversight of that is failing.
I received a response to a written parliamentary question by the cabinet secretary, Gillian Martin, which has left me somewhat shocked. In the Highlands and Islands, in July alone, 40.7 megalitres of water were estimated to have been lost per day due to leakages. That is more than 40 million litres of water lost every day. Since the last election, billions upon billions of litres of water have been lost due to leakages in my region, let alone across the rest of Scotland. That means that, while the Scottish Environment Protection Agency is telling the public to cut down their water use, Scottish Water is literally leaking out water.
How do members think the public feel when they know that, rather than infrastructure being appropriately fixed, large bonuses are instead being awarded? That is why the Public Audit Committee’s findings about Scottish Water’s regulator are particularly damning. The report highlights the extravagance of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, including the spending of £2,600 on Christmas gift vouchers, hundreds of pounds on meals and alcohol, and more than £40,000 on items that did not meet the requirements of the Scottish public finance manual.
Audit Scotland summed it up perfectly in its 2022-23 report when it concluded that
“Value for money should be a key consideration for ... expenditure incurred by public bodies and the findings of the auditor highlight unacceptable behaviour, by senior officials within the Commission, in the use of public funds.”
Audit Scotland is right. Evidently, this was lost on those who were in charge at the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, but perhaps more worrying is the lack of oversight of all of that, which has been mentioned several times so far. It is evident from the report that far more oversight is needed, but, perhaps more broadly, it is about how much scrutiny other agencies and non-departmental public bodies require with regard to how they spend their money.
Although others will disagree with me, I am more and more convinced that, under this Government, Scotland has a culture of bloated quangos and a lack of proper oversight, whether it is in the Water Industry Commission for Scotland or the many other bodies that have been set up to take decisions instead of elected members. It is clear that more must be done to rein in and keep a check on those organisations.
16:21