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To be honest, I cannot say that I have seen any evidence in my own bills so far of a reduction in energy costs. That is the important point. What people have to spend will have an impact on inflation.

I will take two or three points together. Michelle Thomson made a point about a 14 per cent reduction in capital funding over the next few years. Somewhere in your report, you said that living standards are projected to take one of the biggest hits that we have ever seen, and the revenue side will see a pretty small increase in the next few years. You have been asked a number of questions about comparative inflation and taxes. This could be described as a period of austerity. I am not asking you to do this, but has any comparison been done following austerity policies? Such policies are odd, given that the national debt has ballooned to £2.5 trillion. Are austerity policies working for the ends that were set out, or are other countries following a different path that is more productive? Have any comparative studies been done on that?

Do you have any data on Scotland’s relative performance on FDI compared to that in the rest of the UK, excluding London?

Also—this betrays the fact that I have not been involved in these discussions previously—I want to get my head around the discussion on the reconciliation of £700 million. Earlier, you said that that is basically down to timing in forecasting. As best as I can tell—you can tell me if I am wrong—it is not down to any decision or financial act of the Scottish Government. Obviously, that will follow on from the forecasting but, initially, it is a forecasting situation.

The idea of any consistency in when you can do your forecast seems to be undermined by budgets changing every year or not taking place when expected. It is not like it used to be in the 1980s, 1990s or even 2000s, when you knew when the budget or autumn statement would happen. It has been all over the place in the past years. It would be interesting to know to what extent the Scottish Government is responsible for that adjustment of £700 million.

On earnings, we had a discussion earlier about projected comparative rates in Scotland and the rest of the UK. It would be useful to know whether there is any comparison between Scotland and the rest of the UK that excludes London. Also, I was surprised that there was no mention at all—perhaps I am getting it wrong—of the comparatively positive performance in Scotland on employment. Whether it is employment, unemployment or now, for the first time, I think, economic inactivity, the figures have been well ahead of those in the rest of the UK for a number of months. Surely that would have an impact. Is that part of your calculations?

Thanks for that. With regard to the staffing issues that you have mentioned, and perhaps the additional problems for significantly rural health boards, I note that, a long time ago, I was in the military, and if you trained to do something specific that was quite expensive, they would keep you in the military and tell you where you would serve. In the NHS, whether in relation to GPs or other services, could there be some kind of local or national control whereby, once someone graduates from medical school, they would be obliged, at least for a period thereafter, to go to where there are shortages of GPs or whatever? Could there be a role for that or would such an approach simply not fit in today’s health service?

You will be aware that there are Covid inquiries in Scotland and the UK. They will look at various things including the shortcomings of politicians, mainly, and others. However, having heard you speak, I think that it is worth saying that it was an absolutely fantastic achievement to get through Covid and keep the services running. I hope that, in due course, people will recognise the scale of that achievement.

Going back to the subject of Michael Marra’s questions, I note that you said that you intend to reduce the numbers of supplementary staff by half this year. We are only about three months into the financial year, but do you have any idea how things are going so far?

Thank you for that. I also thank all your staff for their work over recent years.

My questions might be a bit naive and all over the place because I am a new member of the committee.

I am interested in the point about inflation and how energy prices falling back is

“leading to slightly lower expectations for inflation and interest rates in the near term.”

From what I observe, core inflation has increased to 6.8 per cent and most commentators think that we are going to get at least one interest rate increase and probably two more interest rate increases, which will affect the housing market and mortgage rates. When do you expect to see a reduction in inflation? Last year, we were told that that would be in the middle of this year, but that has not happened.

Yes.

The reason for raising IT in the first place was really to do with project management and the fact that such projects can swamp smaller organisations, but the issues that have been drawn out are quite interesting.

The data issue, which a lot of people have mentioned, seems to put an obligation on organisations to ensure interoperability at the very start. I think that there has been a change in culture in that respect, with the general data protection regulation and data protection in general being widely perceived as having had a too-chilling effect on data transfer and sharing. That might suggest that a big change is needed.

One issue is data, another is project management and the last issue is the more mundane matter of shared services. Going back to David Page’s point about how we work our way through this, I have to be perfectly frank and say that, having had ministerial responsibility for four of the organisations around the table, I do not think that this will happen unless it is mandated. Somebody is going to have to say, “You’re going to have to put together a group that can look at this.” The cybersecurity issue, which might seem contrary to the issue of data management, is now hugely important, but that sort of approach is not being applied consistently.

My final comment is really just an observation. The fact is that, if we do not join up the dots in a way that suits us for the data that we need, AI will do it—indeed, it can do it right now. If we are not part of it, AI will just supersede any Chinese walls that we might have between collections of data, if that makes sense. We are as well to get ahead of the game, but to be honest I do not see that happening, given the way in which public bodies currently operate. They will, quite rightly, look after their own interests. It goes back to David Page’s point: unless there is a perceived benefit for both bodies involved, it will not happen unless it is mandated.

We have heard a couple of interesting examples about, for example, how Brexit impacted on one organisation, which had to move from a platinum standard down to a gold standard. We have also heard about trying to effect public sector reform during a time of constrained budgets, post-crash from 2010 onwards. That has affected public sector reform, but I am struck by the prevalence of public sector reform being frustrated by or foundering on IT projects—not necessarily digitisation.

For example, about a decade ago, Disclosure Scotland had a terrible experience with an IT project. Police Scotland is sitting with at least eight different legacy systems. There was also the case in the UK of a national health service system in which investment of about £4 billion achieved nothing. Do the organisations around the table perceive themselves to be too small to wrestle with some of the big IT providers in order to get a grip on budgets and timescales for big IT projects that are fundamental to public sector reform? For example, for the police, even implementing what Parliament has set in new laws is difficult with the legacy systems that they have.

Garry McEwan made a point about getting a smaller group of experts with experience across the piece in such projects—good and bad. Would that be a way to overcome what I perceive to be an imbalance, in that quite small organisations are trying to deal with very large, sometimes multinational, IT companies?