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Significant savings of, I think, about £200 million, have already been made through public service reform, and the plan is to save another £380 million. Therefore, there are figures associated with what can be saved, but, going further, the work that Ivan McKee is taking forward with every part of the public sector will generate a plan for each area. To be blunt, the way that things are done in, for example, the health service with regard to front-line emergency services or in the police will not be the same as the way that things are done in less front-facing organisations. It would be a very blunt tool if I were to say that all organisations had to meet a certain percentage of savings, given that the health service needs to ensure that we have more appointments and procedures for patients. Other organisations have opportunities to share services and back-office functions. An across-the-board percentage would be too blunt a tool, but I want to give an absolute assurance that every organisation will have a plan for reduction and how it will do that.

We must be cognisant that front-line services will be prioritised in terms of their ability to deliver, and some of those services will potentially still need to grow. Some of the delivery of additional appointments and procedures will be done through existing staff working additional hours, but the NHS might need to recruit further staff to deliver that.

Applications for the fund—I think that the deadline is the first week of March—will have to set out those savings, so we will know that once the applications have been scrutinised. They will not all be approved. If they do not cut the mustard in terms of what is going to be delivered, they will not be supported. Which applications will be supported is a work in progress, but, once we know which projects will be supported, we will be able to answer the question what the fund will deliver. We cannot answer that at the moment, because we are—

There is no scorecard that I can provide that shows that, if we put money into X, the outcome will be Y. The decision was based on the evidence that was provided to us by others who had done some work on which of the levers that we could pull would have the biggest impact. That evidence was provided to us and we took the decision on the basis of the discussions that we had at that point.

We can provide the committee with the evidence that we got from those organisations in our discussions with them on the work that they had undertaken on the impact of mitigating the two-child cap, but I do not have a scorecard that says that, if we do X, the outcome will be Y. No such scorecard exists. However, the evidence that we garnered from other organisations in our discussions about what more we could do to alleviate child poverty brought us to this point, and that proposition is in the budget as the one that we believe will make the biggest impact on child poverty.

We want to give stability to taxpayers, and so we feel that we have probably gone as far as we should go. We have asked those with the broadest shoulders to pay a bit more, which has helped us with, for example, tackling child poverty. Scotland is the only part of the UK where child poverty rates are falling. That does not happen accidentally; it comes from investment in tackling child poverty, and that investment has come from those with the broadest shoulders paying a bit more, although the majority of Scottish taxpayers will still pay less.

You are right that thresholds will be frozen, but that is the case in the rest of the UK as well. If I remember rightly, the previous UK Government set a policy to freeze the thresholds until 2028, and the current Labour UK Government has continued with that. We believe that the tax strategy that has been laid out strikes the right balance in giving certainty about there being no further changes to tax thresholds until the end of this parliamentary session. That is the right thing to do.

As you well know, that is not what the First Minister said.

The key difference is the granular detail of what the plan will involve. That relates to a point that Michelle Thomson made about data. Ivan McKee is going much more into the detail of the figures relating to each and every public body, and every public body will be tasked with making its own plans for savings and reform down to a level of detail that might have been absent when there was a higher-level requirement for efficiency savings across the board, or for policies that were quite broad in nature. The difference is that each and every public body will be required to deliver a plan for efficiency, reform, sharing services and doing things differently. Doing nothing will not be an option, and the reform will be far more directed.

I will come back to you, because some of those points are still to be agreed with COSLA.

I might have misspoken when I said that. “Misspoken” might be too strong a term, but I would rephrase it. It is more that Councillor Hagmann has been engaging with Opposition spokespeople on COSLA’s behalf, which is absolutely fine. We will do the next phase, which is about building consensus, jointly. I hope that makes sense.

There was no scorecard that said, “This is the range of options and this is compared with that.” There were ministerial discussions on a number of occasions about what evidence other organisations, including child poverty organisations, had brought to us. I mentioned some of them earlier. As one, they said that other things could be done but that that was the one thing that would make the biggest impact. Ministers were being challenged by the First Minister to look at what more could be done to tackle child poverty, and that was the one option that emerged with support from all the child poverty organisations.

The advice that came back was about costings and the likely impact on the number of children who would be kept out of poverty. The 15,000 figure has been superseded to some degree by the Fraser of Allander Institute saying that it could be higher than that and that

“20,000 children would be kept out of poverty”.

At the time, that work was presented to us in terms of the costings. The SFC has now given us its analysis of the costings, which is at the higher end of what we had thought.