Seòmar agus comataidhean

I certainly intend to.

Thank you very much. Your opening statement has, in fact, moved me to other areas than the ones that I was initially going to ask about.

I found your statement very helpful, and I take on board what you have said about budget flexibility. There is a lot more detail and transparency in the Scottish budget than in the UK equivalent. The UK budget provides plans at department level, whereas in Scotland, it is done to levels 3 and 4 in some areas and level 2 in others. Over the years, as you are well aware, the committee has pressed for consistency of approach. Do you not agree that if there were a simple approach of providing level 4 figures, for example, across the board, that would provide more certainty for stakeholders? I know what you are saying about flexibility, but if you are going to provide level 4 funding figures for some particularly big spending areas—where there are likely, I imagine, to be more changes than in the smaller areas—I would have thought that it would have been best to provide level 4 figures across the board.

I did not think that it was six months from today—I thought that it was just every six months.

With regard to the IDP, there have been concerns about the cost timelines, potential overruns in projects and the split between delivery and development costs with regard to what exactly will be delivered and by when. However, cost is a difficult issue. Unless something that you have put out to tender has already been signed and delivered, the fact is that, if you put a hard and fast cost on something, you could make it the minimum for tenders. Therefore, I appreciate that that can prove difficult, but surely, once that is done, the costs, and indeed the delivery times, will be much more carved on tablets of stone.

One of the issues that we have, and which I raised last week with the Scottish Futures Trust and the Construction Industry Training Board, is that cost overruns and delays seem almost to be expected, which I think is wrong. If a sum of money is paid to have something done, it should be done by the date that has been agreed for that sum of money. We know that there is inflation, but one would have thought that optimism bias would be built in when a contractor submits their tender. Inflation is a feeble excuse for some of the overruns that we have had. The same problem is faced across the UK, with HS2 and other megaprojects vastly exceeding the initial cost estimates.

What extra information could be provided? For example, I feel that annex B in the IDP is more of a wish list than a detailed list of projects, which creates uncertainty. CITB told us that most construction companies are very small and that they want certainty in relation to what will come in the door over the next six months to two years. It would help if a lot more detail was provided for such projects. If it is not possible for the IDP to be specific on cost, should it not at least be specific on timescale?

I have always been an advocate of delayering and decluttering the Scottish public sector landscape. It is, to me, nonsensical as it stands; it is like a tree that has grown branches and all the rest of it over many years. De-bureaucratisation, which was very effective in, for example, the police, is really important and something that we should press forward with. In saying that, I am not saying that those who sit behind the front-line services do not play a valuable role; indeed, we should not forget that, given that one cannot work effectively without the other.

Something that is not done enough is the sharing of best practice. We have talked about productivity; as I mentioned to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care in the chamber, I think that, if we are looking at productivity, surely we should be looking at those areas that deliver the best productivity and asking why what they do cannot be mirrored in other areas of the health service, in another part of Scotland or in a local government department elsewhere in Scotland.

Do you not agree that there needs to be more reform in order to do that? Incidentally, this is something that I mentioned in the first parliamentary session, which ran from 1999 to 2003, and we are still in the same position. There is still a real issue about sharing best practice. People have wonderful ideas but, for some bizarre reason, they do not really want others to implement them, or so it seems to me. Can the Government do more to ensure that, where things are working exceptionally well, others are encouraged to mirror that best practice?

While we are talking about being on track, the Scottish Government has sharpened delivery discipline with the creation of a delivery unit. The programme for government is supported by a dashboard that shows whether we are on track. Where are we on that dashboard?

In the media, it has been reported quite extensively that there has been resistance among some civil servants to returning to the office for two days a week, which was a target that you set nine months ago for October last year. You said that you are now going through a process of ensuring that people will be together from October. Where are we with that? Are there any proposals to increase the target of two days a week to three days a week, or are you resting on two days?

Sorry—we are talking about only two days out of a five-day working week. Why is coming into the office so onerous? Pre-pandemic, everybody worked in the office, did they not? It was just taken for granted. That is where you worked—you turned up Monday to Friday and did your shift, and then you went up the road. Now, suddenly, a few years later, we are trying to get folk to do for two days a week what they normally did for five days, sometimes for many years. That seems extraordinary to me—it really does.

I would have thought that you would, indeed, be monitoring the policy to see whether some departments have 100 per cent of people coming back for two days a week—or more, one would hope. In other departments, if the percentage was lower, or significantly lower, you would want to look at why that was not happening and at the issues that might be preventing people from returning to work.

Do people not like working with their colleagues—the banter and all that kind of thing? It is not healthy to sit in your house all the time, working. For me, the fridge would be the big problem because I would be raiding it every 10 minutes. That is not a flippant remark—it is actually true. Surely working is about the camaraderie and a shared vision. Not everything can be done on a computer or by phone. I am struggling to understand what is going on here.

Okay. I am sure that other members will want to explore that further.

Why has there been such a dramatic increase in the number of Scottish Government communications staff over the past decade?

I will give you some figures. The budget for Scottish Government communications staff increased from £2.256 million in 2013-14 to £4.498 million in 2024-25. Allowing for inflation, that is about 30 per cent higher than during the Covid pandemic. There are now 17 special advisers—six more than there were 10 years ago. Why is that necessary?