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On the first point, I will look to see whether that work can be concluded more quickly and provided earlier than June.

In response to the second point, I note that Ivan McKee was clear in a media interview yesterday that it is important that the summit was not a stand-alone, one-off event. It followed a lot of work with public sector leaders, so that everybody understands what is being asked of them and so that we are not expecting business as usual.

We need change and reform, so to incentivise them we have put in place the invest to save fund. I am sure that expectations about bids, about the pace of change and reform, and about the fund’s delivery are topics of conversation. I assure you that Ivan McKee is very hands-on and focused on that work and is more involved in considering the details than ministers have been previously. He is working with leaders across the public sector to improve the work’s pace.

Although the word “strategy” is mentioned, reform is not a long-term aspiration; it is about releasing savings, doing things differently, sharing services and improving public services within the fiscal envelope that is available to us, so that they deliver for people and help them at an earlier stage rather than just addressing problems. It is about getting more upstream, which is what yesterday’s event focused on.

No, Michael. The First Minister did not say that, at all. He never said that he would cut £636 million.

This might be a kind of student debating point but, at the end of the day, the First Minister—

Yes.

Ivan McKee has been on a data-mining mission to address the gaps where data does not exist. You are right in saying that, without data, it is very difficult. Sometimes, it is the data lying underneath that you really need, instead of just the top-level data. We absolutely get that.

There is a tension between public bodies getting on with doing X, Y and Z, and feeling that that is their domain, and, because we are funding them to do this, our need to know that they are delivering in the most efficient way. Everybody has to play their part in ensuring that we are optimising the efficiency of every single organisation, whether through reform, shared services or digital. The interrogation of that perhaps takes place at a deeper level than previously.

No. If there is a range of options to be had, a range of options would be put in front of us. No other options were available that would have the same impact on child poverty. Nothing else emerged in the discussions with child poverty organisations that was going to have that impact. We were given a very clear steer by child poverty organisations that this policy was the one thing that would make the difference in reducing child poverty levels. They had previously pointed towards an increase in the Scottish child payment, which would have been the other obvious option, but they said to us that, rather than do that, with all of the issues around cliff edges and its rubbing up against disincentivising employment and so on, targeting the poorest kids through the mitigation of the two-child cap was the single intervention that we could make that would have the biggest impact. It emerged in a way that there was—

For those who are on pay as you earn, the system is the system and they will probably have quite limited interaction with it. For those who are self-employed and businesses navigating their way through the tax system, our agencies and HMRC work closely with Revenue Scotland to make sure that public information for taxpayers, whoever they are, is as clear as possible. Improvements can be made. That was a theme that came out of the tax strategy, and work is being done to simplify the information and make it more straightforward and easier to understand.

For the £750 million, yes.

What they do with the money is up to them. The distribution group will allocate to each of the 32 local authorities. It is then entirely up to them how they use that money.

Your point is well made. Local authorities commission social care services differently, for example. Whether they try to address some of that will be entirely up to them, but I suspect that it will inevitably come to their door anyway.

Let me be clear: the work on the spending review has been kicked off, so we will not be waiting until after the election. That work will then go ahead at pace and I will work with the committee on the timetable for that, as it is a major undertaking. It is important to communicate with the committee and the Parliament on the spending review.

That line in the response was just a recognition that there is an election. Any new Administration, whatever its colour, will want to put its own stamp on spending plans. That line was just to recognise that the spending plans will be the spending plans until somebody decides otherwise. We can set out the detail of what we believe to be the right correlation of spending envelopes for what, and there may well be a shift—which is what a spending review is all about. We will have to take cognisance of the UK spending review, and there is a lot of chat about what the various envelopes might look like in the future.