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Well, I know—so can I.

Those things are absolutely a balance. The support that we give to retail—the small business bonus scheme, a lower poundage, the work that we are doing on retail crime, the fact that we are not proceeding with the public health supplement and so on, all of which have been welcomed by the sector—is considerable. We want to ensure that we are supporting the sector as far as we can within the resources that we have.

As part of the consultation on any further powers for local government, we would expect to hear from the business and retail sectors about where that is an issue, and we would take decisions in the round. I feel that the response from the Scottish Retail Consortium is quite pragmatic. It had a big concern about the public health supplement coming at the wrong time, so our not proceeding with it has shown that we have listened, which is a good thing.

No. The policies support at least 92 per cent of premises, so the bulk of them will benefit from one of the policies. The reason why I was persuaded to support hospitality in that way was that, out of all sectors, it is still recovering from Covid. Brexit has had a major impact, too, particularly on establishments that are in island communities—the effects of the cost of food and transport, inflation and other impacts on overheads are particularly felt by island hospitality businesses.

Hospitality businesses can very much be at the heart of our communities in the islands and, indeed, of rural communities, which is the point that you made. That is why we have decided to support the sector and deliver the policy in the way that we have.

The basic rate captures the vast majority of local pubs and restaurants but excludes some of the very large premises and chains that have a resilience that those smaller businesses perhaps do not. The policies capture 92 per cent of hospitality premises—that means not just pubs, cafes and restaurants, but bed and breakfasts. It is a balanced approach.

In the light of competing priorities and the need to have a balanced and fair budget, we have done what we can to support as many hospitality premises as we can in a way that is affordable. Going further would have meant that we could not spend money on winter fuel payments, for example. There is a balance.

Our aim is to reduce the civil service workforce through our recruitment controls, and we are working hard to do that. We started with the contingent—in other words, temporary—workforce, which we have reduced by about 40 per cent. Extended enhanced recruitment controls are in place to try to contain the workforce and reduce its size. I do not have a figure, but I expect the trajectory to be downwards.

In general terms, this is about priorities, so we have—

That will be done, first, through the prioritisation of that policy, but also through the other steps that I laid out on fiscal sustainability. Do I accept that, for all our policies, we have to create headroom through changes in the way in which we deliver services? Yes, I do. Earlier, I set out seven such areas, which I will return to in more detail in the fiscal sustainability plan. The work on workforce, public service reform, efficiencies, doing things differently and health and social care reform will all help to reduce costs and ensure that we deliver and prioritise investment not just in social security but in front-line services.

First, let me say, as I have said many times at this committee, that work is absolutely the best route out of poverty. We want to support families into work, whether through employability measures or support through childcare. A lot of work is going on to support the families you might describe as furthest from the labour market in order to break the cycle of poverty, and work is the best way to do that.

However, the issue in the here and now is that families with more than two children are struggling because the costs are not recognised by the UK social security system. The question for society is about the societal impacts of children living in poverty, because it is children who suffer at the end of the day. The later impacts of those children living in poverty and the cycle of poverty continuing will be that there is less chance of their becoming fully contributing members of society, working and contributing to the economy and getting a good output from education, as well as all the social and societal impacts that come from poverty and child poverty.

The fundamental judgment is that we should make an investment to break the cycle of poverty and lift children out of poverty, because we know that there is a societal and economic benefit from that. We believe that to be the case, and we would rather that the UK Government changed its policy. That is why all the child poverty organisations have focused their attention on lifting the two-child cap, because the evidence is that it will have the biggest impact on our remaining child poverty rates. I think that everybody accepts that they are too high and we need to do something about it.

If we do not do this, the question is, what do we do? The evidence shows that it will have an impact.

COSLA made that decision. Are you asking me whether, if the 32 local authorities—which are of various political colours, I might add—come to a decision that the Government does not like, we should overrule that?

We felt that we needed to do more to tackle child poverty, particularly given the statutory child poverty targets, and, when we were deciding on the best way to proceed, we looked at a number of options.

It is partly the issue of cliff edges, which the convener touched on earlier. There is a balance to strike, and we are thoughtful about whether the Scottish child payment becomes a cliff edge or a barrier to work or incentivisation. From the information that we have, we understand that the poorest families are most impacted by the two-child cap. By targeting them, we will achieve a bigger shift on the dial on child poverty than we would with a more general approach.

Those are our judgments. I assure you that we looked in detail at what is the best thing to lean into to achieve the biggest impact, and the child poverty organisations were also very much in the same space. Some of them still argue for an increase in the Scottish child payment, but many have focused on the two-child limit because it affects some of the poorest families, and we think that, by mitigating it, we can achieve the biggest shift on the dial in relation to the child poverty targets.

I have just told you that the civil servants who work in Angus Robertson’s team also have a number of other responsibilities. We are not disbanding any team; I am just saying that it is a small team that does a number of other things as well, and one of the things that it has done is produce the BANS series. As I understand it, there is some further concluding work to be done on that. If you want further detail on it, I will get something from Angus Robertson to give to you.

First, I very much recognise the role of universities. One of the committee’s recommendations was a fund to turbocharge the output from universities into enterprise. I am trying to remember its name. I think that, at one point, the committee called for £5 million in order to do that. I understand that work is on-going in the enterprise space to look at how that can be done and at how we can support our universities with better link-ups to enterprise and to the Scottish National Investment Bank, for example.

We should always keep the tuition fee payments under review to ensure that we are taking some of the headwinds into account. Some of the main ones that the sector has spoken to me about are the drop in international students, particularly from certain areas of the world. The number of international students that universities assumed would attend has fallen off a cliff, as they are no longer coming to Scotland. Some of the UK Government’s changes, such as students not being able to bring partners with them, have also had a major impact. Employer national insurance contributions is another issue that will have a major impact on universities.