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No. I look forward to further engagement with the committee on the budget as we go forward.

I do not accept that. However, I accept that we have, in essence, been trying to make a budget work through a set of absolutely chaotic UK Government decisions, although those decisions have now become less chaotic. Looking to 2025-26 and beyond, that is extremely helpful.

However, trying to set a budget, pay policy or anything else with absolutely no idea of the funding that you will get is really difficult. This might sound basic, but our having an idea earlier in the year what the budget will be and what funding we can expect to receive from the UK Government would be transformational.

I will mention one point before it goes out of my head. Anyone who is involved in negotiations understands their complexity, and the importance of not driving pay inflation and of recognising that it is not just about pay but about making efficiencies, as part of the settlement. For example, in rail, part of the pay deal was linked to making efficiencies.

I would not cut the health budget in order to have contingency in case the pay increase goes up to 5 per cent. Instead, we would look at anything that was above the parameters that we have set to be paid for through efficiency gains and productivity gains. We have to be careful about what we say in pay policy, otherwise it drives scenarios that are not helpful for the public purse. I do not want to cut budgets while we are in the process of negotiating, because that just drives wage inflation. We have to be careful about what we are setting out and what our expectations are.

I will, of course—I do—look carefully at comments from the Fraser of Allander Institute, the SFC and others. However, I re-emphasise how complex pay is and how important it is for us to be very careful about how we land pay policy.

A number of capital projects are on-going. What we are talking about is having a line of sight and certainty for those that have yet to begin. We could just say what we think we can do, but the fact is that a lot of money can be expended in the early days of a project in preparing business cases and so on. Therefore, I would prefer to wait until spring, which is not far off.

My expectation with regard to the Treasury is that we will not have to wait until some day in spring until we get all the information. The flow of information has become much better and we will—I hope—get indications of the direction of travel, which will ensure that, come spring, I can publish, as intended, the infrastructure investment pipeline alongside the medium-term financial strategy. It will use that longer horizon. I hope that that will give certainty and allow a larger number of projects to be taken forward.

At the moment, we are still facing the cut in capital funding. If I were to take what was in the infrastructure investment pipeline and apply that cut in capital, a number of projects would be unable to proceed.

My officials will get that note for you in a second. I have attended all but one or two of those meetings, which have been productive, with quite a wide range of views in the room, as you would imagine.

In addition to the tax strategy group, I have also had meetings with key stakeholders in advance of the publication of the tax strategy to take a wider range of views on what that strategy should do and what it should help us to achieve, and to test the draft objectives.

I am looking at my officials to see whether we have that note.

The group has met three times this year and there has been additional work between meetings to get us to our current advanced point, so I have been able to go out to the wider group of stakeholders with that product.

It has met three times this year.

The tax strategy seeks to do a number of things. It is about providing certainty for taxpayers and raising awareness of our system. That issue was raised quite strongly in the wider forum. Stakeholders were concerned about the lack of awareness of the UK and Scottish tax systems, so we must look at ways of sharing information and raising awareness.

Without a doubt, there is a balance to be struck in how we tackle poverty. The child poverty plan has a number of pillars. One is about direct support to families, which encompasses some of the areas that you talked about, such as the Scottish child payment. However, the plan also talks about services, including those that help to move and support people out of poverty.

Employability services are one of those areas. For example, there have been positive trends in the number of parents who access support. Since the publication of “Best Start, Bright Futures: Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2022-2026” back in 2022, the proportion of parents who access no one left behind support has increased from 26 per cent to about 48 per cent. Services such as supporting parents into employment are absolutely critical.

However, the pillars of tackling poverty have to do everything. Putting money into families’ pockets is important. In our ambitions to meet our statutory child poverty interim targets, the approach that is taken by the plan has three prongs: support to people directly; services that wrap around, such as childcare; and employability, because work is one of the main ways out of poverty. In my view, it is not either/or. As the child poverty plan recognises, we have to make sure that supports are provided in all those ways.

In my constituency experience, I am told time and again by families who face real hardship that having money in their pockets literally puts food on the table. I therefore push back against any idea that we should somehow diminish our support such as the Scottish child payment in particular.

To anticipate your next remark, we need to make sure that the other services that support families are also sustained. That means difficult choices, potentially, in other areas.

Those issues are raised with me frequently, as you are aware. Through negotiation, close to £1 billion of resources were baselined for local government in 2024-25, which were previously ring fenced. That was in advance of the agreement around the accountability framework and the fiscal framework, which are now at an advanced stage. There was a bit of a risk for the Scottish Government in de-ring fencing and baselining without the accountability framework in place, but it was what you might describe as a goodwill gesture, while recognising that some areas remain to be discussed.

On teacher numbers, mitigations are in place against the £145 million allocation for areas where local authorities are seeing falling rolls, or where other issues exist such as recruitment challenges and so on. However, the blunt question that is being asked is, given that we want to close the poverty-related attainment gap, can we do that with fewer teachers? Teachers have an important role to play. Teaching is not the only important role—getting kids to school in the morning and wraparound services are important, too—but teachers are core to that goal. We need to get the right balance. We also need to have teachers in the right place—as you have highlighted, there are issues with falling rolls in some areas and rising rolls in others.

Those discussions are on-going. We want a compromise solution that we can all live with, but, ultimately, what is important is closing the poverty-related attainment gap, and teachers are an important part of that.

Again, I am open minded about any ideas that we can take from international examples in relation to how we construct our budget. However, through this process, I am focused on aligning the budget priorities that are set out in the programme for government with the resources that we have available to us, and how we shape a budget that prioritises that. That, in turn, requires some discussion about deprioritising, which is always the difficult part, and that we create a budget that can command support across Parliament.

I am more than happy to consider ideas, but in the here and now, my focus is on 2025-26. There are opportunities to think a bit differently about the budget on a multiyear basis. Having a single-year budget makes it very difficult to be creative and do things differently because there is a fixed position and you are not able to deliver reform and change over a number of financial years in the resource space or the capital space.

Through multiyear budgeting, we have an opportunity to look at how we do things differently—for example, on pay and on other areas—so that we can take a line of sight on our priorities, and so that we are able to deliver that on a multiyear budget rather than a single-year budget.

You raise a good example. Research, development and innovation is, of course, one of the five core themes in the data-driven innovation initiative deal. It gets £60 million of Scottish Government funding and £290 million of UK Government funding. That is a good example of where we can align funding between the UK Government and the Scottish Government.

I am interested in how, for example, the UK Infrastructure Bank and the Scottish National Investment Bank could work together on those critical investments, as well as having core Scottish Government funding. When there is investment from the UK Infrastructure Bank and SNIB in important areas of growth, there is scope to do more. We have the development of the Edinburgh innovation hub and the investment in business infrastructure in the Fife industrial innovation investment programme, the Borders innovation park and the five data-driven innovation hubs, which you referred to.

We are investing strategically. It is legitimate to ask whether we could do more, and we will reflect on that. I would expect some of those issues to emerge in the bilateral meetings that I have with my cabinet secretary colleagues, so that we can consider the importance of investing strategically in research in Scotland’s growth areas by aligning our funding with UK funds that are more extensive than ours. It will be important to lever some of those funds into Scotland.

I recognise your point about value-added growth. We must invest strategically in the areas that will give the best return.