If I may, please, Mark, yes. Thank you. This is quite an unusual situation, and I felt I ought to write to the committee to draw it to your attention. Because this is the first time, certainly in my time as auditor general—I think the first time since there's been an independent audit office in Wales—that I've given a disclaimed audit opinion on a set of accounts. What does that mean? Well, you'll be familiar with the concept of a qualified audit opinion, which I issue when I have concerns about an aspect of the financial statements or the governance of a given entity. A disclaimed audit opinion goes one step beyond that. So, it is the most serious form of qualification that I can give. In layman's terms, it's me saying, 'I simply cannot give you an opinion on this organisation's financial statements.' In this particular case, the issues that underlie that are quite technical; they relate to how the organisation has accounted for assets on its balance sheet. I won't go into those technical details now in open session, but if the committee wishes to understand them more fully, of course I'm very happy to arrange either a written or oral briefing to run you through that.
But if I might suggest, I think, potentially, it does open up a couple of lines of inquiry that the committee may wish to consider. Less about the organisation itself, which, as you'll see from my letter, is a very small one—it has a turnover of just over £1 million—but more to do with its relationship to the Welsh Government—two areas in particular for me. The committee has previously followed some lines of inquiry related to the Government's support for business, so I'm thinking of the letter I wrote to you just before Christmas about the investments made in TVR, the work you initiated last year around the local partnerships arrangements, the investment made in Gilestone Farm, the life sciences fund, the airport, et cetera, and this seems another example where you might want to test the Welsh Government's strategic approach to business support and how this example fits with that.
The second theme, for me, that falls from this is the line of sight and the grip that the Welsh Government has over its arm's-length bodies and companies, and, again, that's a theme that's come up repeatedly in your work, as you know. This is another example—in this case, where an organisation had its accounts qualified by me last year, for failing to follow proper procurement processes, and now this year, as you see, a fully disclaimed audit opinion. So, what was the Welsh Government's grip on that situation?
So, as I said, if you would like to pursue either of those aspects, I'm very happy to arrange a fuller briefing on the specific issues around SDWP, or to work with Owain and Fay to help craft a few questions for you to put to the Welsh Government. Thank you.