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Exactly. I assure you that we have made that point very powerfully, and we will continue to make it. We want to make progress through some short-term flexibilities. There is the wider issue of agreeing the scope of a more fundamental review of the fiscal framework, but there are some shorter-term flexibilities that could make a big difference, such as those relating to the use of the reserve, borrowing limits and borrowing flexibilities. Those could all make a real change.

On the fiscal framework, the income tax net position can change not just due to differences in tax policies but due to the composition of the tax bases in Scotland and the UK. As the committee has recognised, the position of every area in the UK is skewed by a comparison with London and the south-east, so, if the budgets for every part of the UK were set on the basis of that comparison, it would be very challenging. How the fiscal framework applies in the devolved context absolutely skews the funding base. We have to address that, and we have seen how the framework works in practice for enough years now to know its weaknesses, so the time is right for a more fundamental review.

There are areas for broader consensus around reforms to the existing system, but it is more difficult to find areas of consensus when you get into considering a wholesale council tax replacement. However, we are interested in looking at where the UK Government goes. Seeing whether there is enough common ground will be a post-election discussion.

That is a very interesting idea, which I will take away. The Finance and Public Administration Committee might have a view on that.

The Scottish Fiscal Commission has gone quite far by suggesting that the spending review is a point at which, if others have a different approach to spending plans, they should set that out, particularly in a pre-election period. Given that an organisation as eminent as the SFC is saying that, it will perhaps put a little bit of pressure on Opposition parties to set out alternative spending plans. If they do not do so, that is quite revealing.

It goes back to the point that I just made. Work is absolutely the best route out of poverty—we all agree on that—so how can we ensure that there are routes back into the workplace for people who have been out of the workplace for whatever reason? It goes back to what we talked about earlier—our employability schemes, what works and where the evidence base is. Without a doubt, some of those schemes are very effective, particularly for women who have been out of the labour market for some time due to having kids and so on. However, there is more work to be done in that space.

There is also the point about avoiding people falling out of work in the first place. We know that the longer someone is off work, the lower the chance that they will go back into work. I do not think that we are as good on that as we could be. We could do more in that space.

We have been working on this for many months. Particularly over the summer, we have been working more intensively in meetings and discussions, some of which have been at official level—Richard McCallum might want to say a bit more on that—but I have had direct bilateral meetings with colleagues on shaping priorities in relation to resource and capital. Therefore, yes, that level of detail has been discussed.

We are not a pacifist Government at all. We believe that we should have spending on defence in the right areas, securing Scottish jobs. There are concerns about any defence companies that might have interests in weapons that find their way into areas that we would, I presume, not be too happy about and are concerned about—I am thinking about the position in Gaza at the moment.

There are areas to be differentiated, but the example that you used of Norwegian vessels is the sort of area where we would want growth in defence.

I think that we have already said that. At the time when that measure was announced, we recognised that there would need to be an increase in defence spending on the right things. Our contention is that some of it is not on the right things. You could swap out the huge, eye-watering projected spend on nuclear weapons and spend that on defence forces.

The point that I was making is that the average increase for UK departments is across all departments. The increase for Scotland was much less, at 0.8 per cent. That is also lower compared to Wales, for example. It depends on the configuration of where spend in departments has gone up or down.

We have never said that we will not countenance strike action.

We have seen industrial action in local government previously, and it was costly and disruptive. We need to see where inflation lands first. We have to do this in a context where inflation is predicted. However, it is not a science, and we can see the impact of inflation not going down as quickly as was predicted. That has an impact on negotiations straight away. When we set our pay policy, as the UK Government has done, we set it with the best information that we have at the time. We cannot predict where inflation is actually going to go; we can only rely on OBR forecasts and so on. Therefore, there has to be some flexibility.

In reality, I think that where we have got to with pay deals is better than where we have been previously. That is because of some three-year and, in the main, two-year deals. They give us some space and some certainty for the next two years, during which we can spend the time talking about other things.