Member

At the heart of all this is a lack of trained auditors. The Minister said that the Government are committed to reforming the local audit system. That is true; we have debated the local audit system on a number of occasions over the past year, but at this point—a year after the election of the present Government—stock should be taken about what is happening. How many auditors are in training? What is the ambition or target for the number of trained auditors who will be available to undertake local audit? Without this, this change in threshold from £6.5 million to £15 million is simply in the hope that major problems do not arise.