Public Audit Committee 17 December 2025
As the Auditor General highlights, it was an extreme case and that is why we pulled it out to illustrate the point about the approval arrangements. Currently, the approval arrangements for agency engagement are that it would be approved at deputy director level, regardless of the individual’s daily rate, the length of the appointment or the potential total costs.
I obviously will not name the individual, but as the Auditor General has already discussed, it was a specialist post. The individual retired from the Scottish Government on 1 September 2023. At that point, there was no reason for either party to think that they would re-engage with the Scottish Government. The understanding was that they were leaving, and the Scottish Government thought that it had sufficient internal capacity.
Subsequently, there were some changes within the Scottish Government that meant that the expertise that it thought it could apply to the close-down procedures for European structural and investment funds was not available. It then investigated a number of options. From our discussions, we know that it looked at potentially seconding staff from elsewhere, fixed-term staff or redeploying Scottish Government staff.
As we understand it, the difficulty was that, as the United Kingdom Government was also going through the same process, there was a high demand for that particular expertise. The person was then engaged on 20 November 2023, initially for four months, and that was approved at deputy director level. The engagement was then extended twice; ultimately, it ran until September 2024, so the person was there for nine months. The total cost of that appointment was £221,000.
As the Auditor General says we recommended that, as with consultancy, such an arrangement would be escalated to the director general, and potentially to cabinet secretary level, for approval. The director general of corporate was aware of the arrangement, but there was no formal requirement for it to be approved. We believe that that needs to be tightened up, and the Scottish Government has accepted that recommendation.