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I think that Sarah Boyack will come in on exactly those issues.

I was going to ask a question about small and medium-sized enterprises. Sarah Ronald, you said something quite interesting about the trajectory of your company’s growth. You had 73 per cent growth using the same cost base, because AI allows you to be more—

One of my concerns is that large businesses are twice as likely as small ones are to adopt AI. I wonder whether we are missing a trick. If AI has the potential to almost turn economies of scale on their head, do we need to concentrate a lot more on ensuring that all small businesses seek to use and leverage AI in the way that start-ups almost naturally do? What are your thoughts on that? What can we do to help?

I believe that Michelle would like to ask a brief supplementary.

Thank you. There are some supplementary questions, first from Murdo Fraser and then from Kevin Stewart.

At the outset, I state that I broadly agree with much of what Jeremy Balfour has set out. To my mind, the debate has been marked by two substantial features both for those who are advocating for the bill and for those who are speaking against it, in that we all want to provide dignity and empowerment for those who are in the final stages of their lives and who may well be suffering from conditions and diseases that leave them in an intolerable situation. On the other hand, we also want to ensure that we do not foster a culture in which people feel as though they are under pressure to end their life or that there is an expectation that they do so in certain circumstances, particularly when that involves things such as mental illness, disability and other such issues, as Jeremy Balfour has set out. That is why I think that the definition of terminal illness is so important.

I understand that definitions are always difficult and I understand the reasons why the definition in the bill was arrived at but, to my mind, the key point is that the bill’s provisions must be used only when a person’s death is imminent and expected. If I were to put it glibly, in a sense, we all have a terminal and progressive condition, but the immediateness of it is relative. That is why I think that it is important to include some sort of time boundary, not just for clarity but to prevent judicial expansion, which we have all been very concerned about, based on situations in other countries. I think that there is an inherent issue with the accuracy and effectiveness of time limits. The point is not necessarily about the accuracy of a prognosis; it is about clarity on the immediacy of the likelihood of a person’s death and whether that is a reasonable expectation. Including a time boundary could provide absolute clarity that the likelihood of a person’s death has some immediacy, so that the time period is counted not in years or decades but in weeks or months.

Jeremy Balfour’s amendment 143 sets out the time boundary as three months, which I think is probably too short. If we are leaving these decisions to be made only when death is very proximate, that could preclude people from making a decision as calmly and in as informed a way as possible, although I think that three months would be better than no time limit. If my amendment 4 is pre-empted, I will understand. Whether the committee decides on a timeframe of three months or six months, we need a time limitation in order to set out clearly that there should be the expectation of the likelihood of a person’s death being imminent.

Will the member accept my point that, in principle, rather than necessarily establishing an accurate prognosis, setting a time limit is about trying to set a time boundary around the immediacy of the expectation of the end of life? Does he imagine that such time bands would at least have to feature in guidance so that we do not run the risk of expansion? In other words, how does one judge that immediacy if we do not put it in the bill or guidance?

I wonder whether Bob Doris would agree with me on this. There are two points here: one is the principle, and one concerns the technical drafting. On the principle, as he has pointed out, the policy memorandum seems to suggest that the bill is about providing a possibility for people for whom death is very near or imminent. That is different from the technicalities of how we capture that. However, it is important to establish whether we want to capture that immediacy in the bill itself or leave it to further regulation and guidance. Does the member agree with me that, even if the committee rejects the technicalities of what has been drafted, we need some understanding of whether members accept the principle?

Will the member give way?

I understand the member’s point—you do not lodge an amendment that proposes a time boundary without thinking about such things. On the other hand, the principle is that we want the right to be exercised by people whose death is imminent. Jeremy Balfour put that in terms of weeks or months. How do we capture that correctly unless we insert a time boundary? Is there another way to capture it? We are not setting an absolute threshold; we are literally just capturing the sense that the right is to be exercised by people whose death is very likely to be in the coming weeks and months rather than years away.