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My final question goes to our witnesses from SOSE. I am a great fan of our railways. I take a keen interest in the Kilmarnock to Dumfries line, in the middle of which lies Thornhill. Is SOSE still actively pursuing and promoting the reopening of Thornhill railway station? When I look around Scotland I see a lot of stations reopening. However, most of that is happening in the east and the north and very little of it in the south and the west. Thornhill is slap-bang in the middle of SOSE’s territory in the south of Scotland. Is the reopening of its station a project that you are still keen to support and promote?

It is about those bigger investments. I meet constituents every day, including on the weekend, and they will ask me what Scottish Enterprise has done to improve regeneration in the fabric of towns such as Kilmarnock. It is not about high street retail and stuff like that. Plenty of people have come to me and said they have tried to repurpose a long-closed nightclub, for example, and turn it into a small hotel but they have not got a penny’s help from anybody. I find that kind of thing difficult to explain. I look at Scottish Enterprise’s investments and I think, “Well, why not?”

Is it a question of scale and the particular model that you operate? Is your focus too national or too regional? Should there be another model that allows smaller-scale investment like that, which would provide the kind of assistance that local people would see and readily identify with?

Can you see where I am coming from? There is the national agency—you—and South of Scotland Enterprise, but we do not have an agency in my part of Ayrshire. We have not had that since Enterprise Ayrshire disappeared. Various other models have replaced it—South of Scotland Enterprise has a funding pot to help it—but the agencies that help places such as Kilmarnock, Ayr and Irvine directly do not have a funding pot. That is where I think there is a gap. Do you recognise that, and is there scope to think about the model and to intervene directly at a local level?

Good morning, Adrian and Kerry. Could I continue for a moment or two the discussion about the interventions that you can make locally? You kind of answered the question at the outset, Adrian. You have a national and a regional focus, but somebody like me, from Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley, long laments the loss of Enterprise Ayrshire and looks askance at South of Scotland Enterprise. I feel that we have lost the kind of intervention that the enterprise agency offered many years ago.

My questions are in and around the local impact that you can make. You have partly answered the question in answers to Stephen Kerr and Lorna Slater, but how do you see Scottish Enterprise’s role in assisting the regeneration of towns such as Kilmarnock, Ayr and Irvine?

Good morning. I want to ask about the community dimension of the transformation of local government services. Andrew Burns, you mentioned the five themes of vision, planning, governance, collaboration and innovation. How far do councils reach out to communities to get their participation in transforming local government services?

Have we seen enough of that early engagement across the board? For example, the committee has seen great work in North Ayrshire on community wealth building, where the early participation of communities that Andrew Burns talked about is really paying dividends. As I understand it, great stuff is going on in Fife as well, which I think is transformative. Are you seeing enough of that across the board to push the agenda a bit faster?

All councils have an internal audit function throughout each council. For many years, when I was on the Public Audit Committee, we focused on the duties and roles of internal audit compared with external audit. Should any council’s internal audit function come up with the same ideas and proposals that are suggested in the Accounts Commission’s reports? Why should we need another layer that, in effect, says the same thing?

Is there a wee bit of work to be done in illustrating to some authorities what transformation looks like and what it means? Is there an issue there? Is that one of the barriers?

Okay, great. My other question is an interesting one. It comes from what the chief executive of Clackmannanshire Council, Nikki Bridle, said last week. I had better use her words. She said that, at the same time as councils are

“transforming and reforming, our auditors ... need to be in the same space”,

and that, in terms of evaluating new and complex models,

“some of the traditional skill sets might not be as relevant”.—[Official Report, Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, 9 September 2025; c 44.]

I had to use the exact words—I hope you do not mind. I would be interested in your response to that comment.

Do the councils always agree with your recommendations?