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Thanks for that detailed answer.

Other members might also be interested to come in on this issue, but I want to go back to your comments about the need to find additional sources of revenue. There is a question in my mind about whether there are pots of money that are not being utilised but which could be used to really drive innovation and sustain the cultural sector.

I will raise one source of money in relation to city deals. It is understood that a vast amount of money that has been allocated to the Stirling and Clackmannanshire city region deal remains unspent, and that the value of that money is going down every single year because it remains unspent. Are city deals in particular focused enough on delivering a cultural offering, or are there city deal or other sources of funding that could be utilised to really support and bootstrap the initiatives that you are looking to drive forward with the £6.6 million?

To put that into context, the unallocated spend in the Stirling and Clackmannanshire city region deal is more than £15 million. Therefore, the money in Stirling and Clackmannanshire alone dwarfs the revenue that you are putting into Creative Scotland. It feels as though there are potential sources of revenue out there, but maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part.

I was interested in the minister’s comments about the community bus fund. A modest amount of money has been allocated to it. Which local authorities are taking up the opportunity, particularly on the revenue side, to work on a business case and look at the options for franchising and municipalisation? Are they predominantly rural local authorities or urban local authorities? It would be useful to get a sense of how local authorities are responding to the money that is available and what work they are doing.

No.

Obviously, basic legal requirements are enforced by the commissioner. I get a steady stream of complaints about buses regularly failing to turn up, which, presumably, is something that the commissioner could enforce. However, now that we are in this space of how we improve bus services working in partnership and given the substantial amount of money that is going in, I am interested to hear more about how the Government can extend conditionality further and beyond just basic legal compliance with a timetable.

Yes—unless other witnesses wish to offer insights.

Going back to the deputy convener’s questions on the environmental court, the case for that and our lack of compliance with Aarhus, how do you see the debate moving forward? Lloyd, you mentioned, I think, that in the previous parliamentary session there was a round table on environmental governance that was chaired by Campbell Gemmell. It feels like we have been going around the issue for some time. If you see a way forward, what does it look like? There have been calls in evidence for a further governance review. I am interested in how that would be different from what we have seen coming through and what the Government has already conducted.

All done.

It has been an interesting evidence session. I was just reflecting on the number of constituents who write to me every week with concerns about the quality of services. They write not just about whether the services are running but about whether they are running on time or whether buses are breaking down.

I want to ask you about the conditionality applied to public sector funding. Jenny Gilruth, as a previous Minister for Transport, announced a review of bus sector funding, part of which was going to be a consideration of what conditionality could be applied. Obviously, we have the Traffic Commissioner for Scotland, who is able to hold some of the bus companies to account, but I am interested in hearing about the work that the Government has done to make the substantial investment in the bus sector every year conditional on some basic standards of service and improvements going forward.

Do you think that conditionality needs to go beyond fair work to actual quality of delivery of services?

I was going to ask a series of questions about individual cases, but the evidence that we have just heard has been useful in that regard.

I have two follow-up questions. Is there work that ESS has done recently in which you have batched together concerns that have come from individual cases, then made recommendations about changing systemic approaches to regulation? An example might be acoustic deterrent devices. Shivali Fifield mentioned the River Almond, where the system has perhaps not worked well. Are there areas where ESS has worked well by collating individual cases and pointing to systemic change?

My other question is for SEPA. I was struck by your submission, in which you talk about an increase in the number of complaints. In your view, is there an expectation among complainers that ESS will pick up a batch of complaints that come to SEPA and work to address systemic issues? Could you elaborate a little on that? I will be a bit startled if SEPA is saying that it is concerned about the number of complaints and how it will resource the work, and that that is a problem with the system, rather than it addressing its practice. I am interested to hear comments on both those issues.