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That is absolutely possible. We are looking at that as part of the review. Clearly, every portfolio and every situation is different, but there is a series of questions to ask about whether, in order to improve efficiency, bodies are minimising their back-office costs through the shared estate strategy and the shared service programme for information technology, and addressing duplication between them and the Government. We are taking steps directly with public sector bodies to understand how we should go forward. In a scenario in which more than one public body is fulfilling a particular function, we will, of course, ask questions about why that is the case.

You and I have experience of seeing the situation that you describe in other large organisations in our earlier careers. It is fair to say that there is always a risk that people, wittingly or unwittingly, fall into seeking to make organisational change in order to create the illusion of progress. That is par for the course and is therefore always an issue that we need to be conscious of.

People, for good reasons, will think that they are doing the right thing by highlighting an issue that they think is important. One way in which they can do that, self-evidently, is to propose and create a commissioner. However, the next question must be whether that is the most effective way to deliver both for that group and across the broader system. That goes back to what I said earlier: keeping things simple is a very effective principle, and we want the organisational structure and the landscape of public sector bodies to be as simple as possible with as few moving parts as possible. That is how you get the most cost-effective solution and the most effective delivery, because people will not be falling over each other as they try to do their jobs, and it will be much clearer who is responsible for what and whether they have delivered.

I very much hope not, because of the needs of the broader public sector landscape. It is my role to ensure that we drive change and make things more efficient and effective, taking money from the back office and freeing it up for the front line, simplifying the landscape, making it clearer who is responsible for what and delivering better public services for the people of Scotland as a consequence.

The commissioner landscape is a small subset of that. As I said, it is not the Government’s role to interfere or to conduct a review of the commissioner landscape per se, but the Government can absolutely take a view on whether there should be new commissioners and how they would support the broader ecosystem.

The committees review and scrutinise the work of the commissioners and a range of other things, including, rightly, the work of Government. It is not up to Government to say how committees should scrutinise and carry out that work. If that SPCB-sponsored commissioner feels that the Parliament and its committees have not scrutinised his work effectively, that is a conversation to bring to the attention of the Parliament and the committees.

Yes.

As with everything else that happens in the legislative programme, if legislation creates a commissioner or some other piece of work that needs to happen, that is considered and scrutinised through the financial memorandum that is part of the parliamentary process, and then the whole Parliament takes a view on it. The Government clearly has a significant influence on that, depending on the issue. Then there is a budget process where the resource requirement in the relevant parts of the public sector landscape is assessed to understand what resources bodies will need to carry out the functions that are asked of them. That is an on-going process.

Well, clearly if a commissioner has not been set up, there is nothing to evaluate other than what the proposal is, what the financial memorandum is and what the expectation is.

Depending on the portfolio, I think that the Government would, of course, always seek to take views from organisations that can reflect the views of various stakeholders. In my experience in the economy space, we talk to a lot of different organisations all the time.

If you are asking whether the Government is concerned about a scenario in which parliamentary committees were not doing their job and that was having a material impact on public service delivery, clearly the Government would have an issue with that. However, we need to be careful of Government straying into that space.

Because of the work that each commissioner has in holding Government to account, it is important that Government is not seen to be stepping into that space and acting as the scrutineer of those bodies, nor is it our role to say whether commissioners are being scrutinised correctly or effectively. That, rightly, is Parliament’s job. If we were saying the opposite, you would, rightly, not be happy about that.

It is all important. Of course it is. I think that you clearly understand that as well. If you are faced with a series of problems and have a job to do to figure out how to save money across that, clearly you give more attention to the areas where you will save the most money. It would be ridiculous not to do that. Nobody would expect you to do that or would thank you for saving £1 million when you could have saved hundreds of millions of pounds.