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I wanted to come back to something that Stephen Boyle said. Perhaps he can repeat what he said in his answer.

I am interested in the delay to the audit work. What is the broad balance? We can understand that there is complexity because you are having to do audit work remotely or with social distancing. There is an inherent productivity issue because of the Covid restrictions. What is the split between that issue and the fact that the nature of the activities being undertaken by public bodies, and the way that they are being funded through extraordinary Covid funding, is making your audit work more complicated? In other words, it is more difficult to follow the audit trail because of the nature of the work. Do you have a sense of that split? Have I missed anything else in my assessment of why audit may be taking longer?

Is your connection okay, Professor Alexander? Should I come back in with a question, chair?

I will leave it there, chair. I have one more question that I may ask later in relation to investment. However, it may be covered by one of my colleagues.

My colleagues have covered the major issues. I want to raise an issue that may seem slightly niche and left field. The shopkeeper in me could not help but look over the figures for the Parliament shop, and I have some observations.

The shop’s revenue was £250,000 in the year preceding Covid, and footfall in that year amounted to around 260,000 visitors. That revenue strikes me as very low. It is important, in these times, that we ensure that the Parliament maximises not just its ability to control costs but its revenue.

I also observe that, in your forecasts, the gross profit margin is going to jump from 44 per cent to 50 per cent. Although 50 per cent is a better profit margin for a gift shop, any forecast that sees a gross profit margin increasing by 5 per cent would make me ask how that will be achieved. I also observe that the forecast does not really account for the true cost of operating the shop—there are no utilities and no hypothecated rent. I suggest that, if you were to add those things on, the shop would probably be running at a loss, given that it is anticipated to make a profit of only £17,000.

Is it sensible for the Parliament to directly manage the shop? Might it not be better to lease or license it? It could be let to a third party operating under a licence to use the Scottish Parliament branding. There are other public sector providers such as museums and art galleries that run very successful shops.

There is a lot there. The broader theme is the question of whether we are making the best use of the visitor shop and whether we could generate more than the 80p per visitor that we seem to be generating with the existing set-up.

I will come on to that point in a moment, but I agree that what we should all be focused on, in essence, is getting more people earning money and getting those people who are already earning money earning more. We can all agree on the need for that to happen, and for it to happen as fairly as possible.

I understand the complexity of the reconciliations: the mechanism of block grant adjustments is simple when we see it on a flow chart, but it is complicated when we look at the different time lags. However, I feel that your answer was more about what happens within a given year, whereas I am really asking about the broad trend and the broad envelope, which will need to be addressed over the next three, four or five years. I recognise that you cannot predict the precise numbers that will drop out of those streams, but the overall picture that is painted by the Fiscal Commission involves placing downward pressure on budget lines that are not social security, does it not?

I am referring to figure 3.19 in the SFC’s report, which presents a crude aggregate picture of total pay growth between February 2020 and September 2021.

Indeed; that is the only reason that I pressed the point. It is highly important.

I am conscious of time, but I have one last question, which is relatively broad. I would like to get the cabinet secretary’s response to Stephen Boyle’s comments, which were issued with the audited accounts last week. In reference to the Covid funding in 2020-21, he said:

“While there is some high level details about how this money was used, the government needs to be more proactive, open and transparent with the provision of this important detail.”

Critically, it strikes me that the budget is a balancing act between business as usual, immediate response to Covid and recovery. That is difficult, and to do it effectively, you need transparency, not just over what you have spent in the past, but on an on-going business basis. As well as responding to Stephen Boyle’s comments, can you say how the Government will track the Covid spend between those three poles?

I would not call it that, Mr Carlaw, but you get the broad theme.

I rather suspect that, if Douglas Lumsden was asking questions after me, he would reflect that local government would like multiyear budgets and predictability just as much as the Scottish Government would, but I will move on.

On the point about growth, and especially income tax, the big surprise from the Fiscal Commission’s report, in a sense, is that the reconciliations were a lot more detrimental than expected. Many of us were expecting them to be positive, rather than negative. Figures 3.16, 3.18 and 3.19 in the commission’s report deal with income tax changes. This was touched on by Liz Smith, but it is worthy of further interrogation. I am looking at the change in pay as you earn—PAYE—in terms of mean pay and of total pay. It strikes me that there is more going on than has been alluded to.

Some of the analysis that was presented by the Government was that, as ever, Scotland is lagging behind London and the south-east, but the analysis that is presented in the report would suggest that the situation is actually significantly worse than that—the comparison is not just with London and the south-east. Critically, one would expect some of the points that you made about upper pay bands to apply equally to other regions, such as the north-east and north-west of England and Wales, yet Scotland is lagging behind on most of those measures. I would be interested to hear your analysis of that.

Professor Graeme Roy and others have highlighted the issue of labour participation rates for younger and older cohorts. Is that not a big problem? Should we not pay much more attention to labour participation and ensure that we are putting people into the right sectors, especially at a time when there are labour shortages? A glass-half-full view is that that is an opportunity to get people into better paid jobs.

Yes but, frankly, you can look at the other cuts as well. The two other perspectives that the SFC provides show roughly the same picture.