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Mr Kellet, I liked your appeal at the beginning, when you said that you were not necessarily looking for any additional money. That is probably quite reassuring for the Government at this point in time.

I tried to find the evidence session in which this evidence was given to the committee. I cannot remember who gave this evidence, but we had somebody before us who said that one of the tensions in the NHS is the striving for more people—more surgeons, more doctors and more nurses. The analogy that they used was that putting more chefs in a kitchen that has no better equipment or that is not bigger will not necessarily lead to more throughput. Is there a tension because the Government—it is the fault of all of us, to a certain extent—is pressing for more clinicians et cetera when, in order to move towards real preventative spend, we need to change the narrative with the public and say that, actually, the old ways of doing things will not necessarily deliver? We know that we need to bring down orthopaedic waiting lists, for example, so we do need to focus on that, but is there a trade-off and is preventative spend losing the argument at the moment?

Good afternoon. In your statement, you said that you

“have no time for hubris and complacency.”

You are not in post yet, so perhaps you can be a little more open. To go back to John Mason’s point about simplicity in the tax system, I am aware that the Scottish income tax system has more rates than the rest of the UK, including a starter rate that goes from £12,571 to £15,397, which is just 1p in the pound less than the next rate. Various organisations, including ICAS, have said that complexity is not necessarily helpful in the tax system. Is that the sort of complexity that you would advocate that Scottish ministers look at again, given the relatively small difference that it makes to the tax take and to taxpayers?

That leads me to my next question. If you are talking about size, scale and function, one bit that seems to be missing from the debate is the productivity of the Scottish Government workforce. What more could the Scottish Government, supported by bodies such as Audit Scotland, be doing to look at the productivity of the workforce rather than simply its size and cost?

Is there a cultural issue emerging that relates to productivity but also to pay and conditions in the public sector and the private sector in Scotland? We see organisations such as BlackRock now saying that it wants staff back in the office three days a week, and senior management four to five days a week, but we see a different culture perhaps emerging within the Scottish Government. We heard the permanent secretary discussing how difficult it was to get civil servants to agree to go back into the office. We see a possible reduction in the working week in terms of number of days, and we have seen a reduction in the working week in terms of number of hours. Is there a sense that the cultures that are emerging in the public and private sectors in Scotland are at variance, and will that have an impact on the Government’s ability to deliver productivity and efficiency through the public sector?

Is there a risk with all the different documents that come before us, including your reports—when I was on the Public Audit Committee, I could sense your frustration when you came back time and again on the health service or major capital projects and identified the same weaknesses in the system—that we simply cannot see the wood for the trees, because there is so much verbiage, and that a simpler approach to how we set, monitor, report back on and audit goals would be more useful for this committee, Parliament and the public at large?

No, I wanted to come in on public sector pay.

On that 9 per cent target, you will be well aware from ministers that the Scottish Government has a fixed budget and that, therefore, its capacity to borrow or to fund public sector pay effectively comes out of other public services.

Over the years, as we have considered the Scottish budget, the finance secretary has said that she did not want to set out a public sector pay policy because that would become the floor through which public sector pay negotiations are conducted. What is the mood among your members on public sector pay specifically, given that we now have a 9 per cent policy over the next three years? That could be subject to change but that is the policy now. Is there an awareness that there will be cuts to front-line services if your members, particularly public sector unions, continue to press for pay settlements that are above that 9 per cent, which is what we are tracking towards at the moment?

I have two questions on a quite different subject. I asked the Audit Scotland witness earlier whether they had a better definition of preventative spending and whether we could get a categorisation that could be baked into a budget and therefore become ring fenced. Is there any international best practice around that that you and the Government could learn from? It strikes me that preventative spending is still quite nebulous.

My question for David Livey concerns the financial pressures that many voluntary organisations are feeling. When I used to be a councillor I often had to look closely at funding applications. I would notice how difficult such organisations found it to pay their staff and keep the lights on in their premises, as Ms Smith mentioned earlier. Are such pressures making those issues worse? When I used to look at those applications, I would notice a pay gap, in that people working for voluntary sector organisations—which, in many senses, fulfil what should be the role of public services—seemed to be paid significantly less than they would be had they been working for local authorities, for example. Are those pay gaps extending and widening?

To go back to the point about preventative spending, if the voluntary sector cannot fulfil the vital services that they provide, the responsibility for doing so will roll back on the state, at, I assume, considerably higher cost. Are you noticing any deterioration in pay and conditions in the sector? How aware are central and local government bodies that if we lose those voluntary organisations the upstream costs down the line will be much more significant?