Well, I thank the Member for that and for the interest that I know she showed in the review itself. I know from my discussions with her that she wants to see a community and town council sector that is strong and that will stand up to scrutiny as well. I share the auditor general's concern at the continuing high number of community councils that have received qualified audit opinions. Now, the Member referred to 340 of them, and I think it's fair to say, as I'm sure she will acknowledge, that the majority of those are relatively minor infractions of submissions being made a few days beyond the deadline and sometimes the correct form not being used and so on. But there are examples where the difficulty goes beyond that and where there are public interest reports that the auditor general has had to publish because of his concern at probity in the way the public money has been used, and that is completely unacceptable.

Now, the auditor general has now agreed that he will review the adequacy and effectiveness of the current audit arrangements to ensure that they are fit for this purpose, and that review will give us an opportunity to make sure that we have a regime in place that guarantees the community councils are independently accountable and that when they use public money, they do so in a way that is robust, that is defensible and that stands up to scrutiny from those outside the membership of those councils.