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When you use the term “spin doctors”, I think that it is in reference to the entire communications staff across every public sector organisation. I will write back to the committee on that. The special advisers take up a couple of desks in the office on the fourth floor of the Parliament. The idea that there is an army of hundreds of them is not the case—no way. I think that that figure captures every communication officer in every public body in every part of the public sector, including every NHS board and probably local government, too, in order to make it a big figure. If your question to me is about what the value of those roles is, I think that it is important that there is communication from our public organisations, not least the NHS. Public organisations must have an effective way of communicating, and that is what the people concerned are tasked with doing.

There is a challenge in making sure that we are able to sustain our public services and that we prioritise and make our front-line public services sustainable. Without getting too far ahead of what will be set out regarding the workforce and the public sector in the reform programme, that will inevitably mean changes to how things are delivered. The use of technology and digital will help us in our ambitions to make those changes, but some support functions will look different over the next few years. That will all be set out in due course as part of those plans.

We do not collect the costs in that way, but it is clearly inefficient to have to go backwards and forwards to extract information. The protocol was probably an attempt to streamline the process and have an agreement that could help to move that forward. We are pleased that we got that, but it is then about the custom and practice. You would have thought that it would have been good for the same time, effort and priority to be given to a sit-down negotiation with each of the devolved Administrations, rather than our having to negotiate and spend all that time with Whitehall departments. By and large, our budget will be set by the fallout from that.

It is inefficient, and I will tell you about another thing that is inefficient. We offered to work with the UK Government around some of the economic opportunities. At the meeting that was not the FISC, I made the point that, if we aligned our economic energies and efforts—and, sometimes, our funding—so that they faced in the same direction, we could get a lot more out of that. For example, the Scottish National Investment Bank should be able to access the National Wealth Fund, rather than being the recipient of decisions that are made elsewhere. How could we align and agree to get more bang for the bucks from the investments that we are making? That was our offer.

I am always up for discussion about how further progress can be made and am keen to engage further on the detail of some of the areas that you have raised.

The only point that I would make about in-year transfers is one that I have made before. Policy direction quite often sits in one area while delivery sits in another so that, say, a policy could be set by education but delivered by local government. That is one example—there are many others. There is then a tension between the policy and its delivery. If all the money is transferred at the start, where does that leave policy decisions in that area of Government?

The aim of the fiscal sustainability delivery plan is to bring all the component parts across Government into one place, where we will set out actions and the pillars of the plan so that the Parliament, the committee and external stakeholders can see it all and track its delivery. It is an attempt to make that information more transparent and accessible. I will be able to set out our suggested review processes. The plan will, clearly, be linked to the MTFS but it will focus on the how and the what, and we will be able to put some timeframes against the delivery of the actions that we need to take.

We will keep you informed of any substantial developments.

The Acorn project is a good example of that. We have offered to increase funding in order to push the UK Government down the road of approval of Acorn, and it remains to be seen whether that happens at the spending review. There is an inefficiency in not aligning the investments, strategies and leverage that we have as Governments. We should be trying to face those in a similar direction.

Exactly.

The tax advisory group—we were really clear about this with the members of the group and in our public communications—was not set up in such a way that we would say to it, “This is our tax policy for the budget.” Apart from anything else, if I were to do that before informing the Parliament, I would get myself into difficulty. The tax advisory group was not a group that we would, in essence, consult on the tax rates for each budget, and that was made very clear with the group at the start.

We work with the tax advisory group on things such as the public’s understanding of tax and areas that we could improve in that regard and on ensuring that we look at all the component parts in the here and now and the areas that we might look at in the future. In essence, that is my response. I would not have been telling the tax advisory group about our proposals for tax. That would not be right, because the Parliament should hear about those first and foremost.

We take advice from the Scottish Fiscal Commission. We give the commission the information and details of what we have been looking at. We give it various options, and it comes back with what they would mean in terms of revenue raised or potential behaviour change. We will also look at data from HM Revenue and Customs. We look at all those things, but the Fiscal Commission is the main body that will have done analysis in advance of our making decisions.