Corporate Plan – podcast transcript

Fiona:  I’m joined today by Diane McGiffen, Corporate Services Director, and we’re going to be discussing Audit Scotland’s new corporate plan.  Diane, if you could just start off by telling me the key messages of this document.

Diane:  The plan sets out what we will do to continue to deliver audit across the public sector in Scotland and in particular the focus we will have on delivering a more streamlined audit through working more effectively in partnership with other scrutiny bodies; developing a better balance between holding to account and helping organisations to improve; increasing the impact our work has through new ways of communicating, new ways of sharing the findings of our work and so on; developing ourselves so that we can become a centre of excellence for public audit and working to keep the costs of our work to a minimum compatible with delivering a high quality audit and also making sure that we’re transparent about what we charge for our work and what our governance arrangements are.

Fiona:  There was a widespread consultation carried out during the summer before the corporate plan was put together how much of these key messages was drawn from the feedback to that consultation?

Diane:  All of the priorities we set out in the corporate plan were informed by the consultation that we undertook with clients and stakeholders.  We’ve also published alongside the plan on our website a document which sets out the key messages from the consultation and points readers to where they can find those issues addressed in the corporate plan so it’s very directly related to the results of the consultation that we’ve undertaken.  We’re very grateful to all of the clients and stakeholders who took the time to complete quite a detailed survey about 27 percent of our clients and stakeholders responded.  This is quite a high response rate for this sort of survey and it’s really enabled us to have a really good benchmark, that’s hugely helpful for us.

We also worked with Capability Scotland to involve people with disabilities as part of the process pf creating the corporate plan and that has provided us with some very useful views and feedback about the perception that people with disabilities have about the role that we have, the extent to which they are aware of the work that we do and the ways in which we can improve that to meet our disability equality duties.

Fiona: Now, there have been a lot of changes in the public sector landscape over the past few years and there look to be more coming as well.  How do you think this plan will help Audit Scotland operate in the new landscape?

Diane:  One of the key questions that we asked out clients and stakeholders was how they saw the environment in which they were working changing over the next five years and what they thought would be the key pressures for them and the plan’s been developed around that.  We’re very clear that we have to work effectively to streamline the scrutiny arrangements with our other partners over the coming years and also to demonstrate more effectively the value of the work that we do.  The plan sets out the ways in which we’ll do that and it’ll be an ongoing challenge for us, working with our clients and stakeholders, working with other partners to continue to develop and respond to whatever other changes come down the pipeline because the plan is built on what we know today but we have to make sure it’s flexible and can adapt.  

Fiona: So if someone were to sit down and read the corporate plan what sort of message about Audit Scotland would they take away with them?  

Diane:  I hope that anyone reading the plan would see we have a clear sense of direction, a clear sense of purpose, we’ve got a strong sense of where our strengths are in our professional and technical expertise and a strong sense from the consultation of what more people are looking for from us.  The plan sets out quite a lot of detail about the sorts of work people will see us publishing but the published work is only a part of the work we do and what we hope our clients and stakeholders will see over the next three years is that through our contact with them, through working with them we’re looking to help them deliver the best public services for Scotland.

Fiona: Diane, thank-you very much.