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As I said, there are a number of factors. With the transition of the benefit, there will be one pool of people who have been through various processes—in the UK context, obviously—and there will new applicants coming through who will not have been through that process or been assessed by Social Security Scotland under its mechanism. I am not close to the detail on that, but I would expect it to continually reassess its processes to ensure that they are appropriate.

You have to remember that that is one part of a suite of things that are happening. It is the first time that we have undertaken that novel approach. We focused on tackling a specific problem: reducing costs in one part of the system in a different financial year when the cost is included in another part of the system in the current financial year.

Clearly, in the normal run of events, there is no incentive for the portfolio that is seeking to make that expenditure to spend it out of the current year’s budget when someone else gets the benefit in several years’ time. We designed the system to cope with that. We invited applications from multiple portfolios to work together, and there is a clawback mechanism whereby a proportion of the fund comes back in future years, based on the assessment of the savings that they make in the other portfolios.

I will be honest with you—we did not know how that was going to work. We have had some uptake, which is good, and a number of very successful projects. We pitched a number of proposals where we thought they might land. However, because it is quite a different way of budgeting and deploying resources, portfolios are working at pace to get their heads round how they engage with the process. It would have been good had there been more take-up, but that tells us that we have more work to do to get people to focus on preventative opportunities, because they did not previously have a mechanism to resolve that.

I would expect that that is because more people are using the service. If I am not mistaken, operators make a claim on the funding based on usage. I can double-check that. However, if that is an indication of more people who are eligible for concessionary travel travelling more on buses, I suppose that I would say that that would be a positive thing. I can check the specifics on that for you.

I do not have any information on the smaller number—the £1 million or so. The bigger number comes back to the point that Mr Hoy made about the invest-to-save scheme. As I said earlier in relation to the uptake of the £30 million scheme, it is only one part of what is happening. It is tackling a specific challenge of portfolios perhaps not taking up opportunities because of the way in which the budget process has traditionally worked. The scheme is a mechanism to alleviate that problem. Because it is a different way of doing business, it is not necessarily something that the portfolios would have been looking for, and so it was perhaps always going to be a bit of a challenge to get everything right in the first year.

I can do that. However, what I will say is that, although we certainly look at this in the abstract from a policy perspective, the nuts and bolts—the reality—of how this works is that there are year-end requirements to deploy the funds, and whether they are deployed is based to a large extent on where they can best be deployed or how they can be deployed, rather than where, in a perfect world, we might think that we want them to be deployed.

The offshore wind spending will be partnered up with private sector investment, and it is not always possible to have a complete assessment of that in advance of when the budget is laid. As a result, funding might not be deployed at the rate that we thought it would be, depending on other factors that are outside our control.

I would not know. I would need to check whether ADP tapers out eventually; I am not sure whether it does or not. However, Mr Mason is right that, if people are exiting, then it is because they will no longer be eligible for the benefit, for whatever reason. They may have got better, which is a good thing.

Officials will keep me right on the technicalities. AME funding comes from the UK Government as non-cash to support pensions and other such things that are funded by it. Again, we cannot access that money to spend it. The UK Government manages and funds those things.

Have ours fallen faster than the UK’s, then?

I would not read into that that the whole PSR programme has a challenge. This is one specific part of it, which focuses very much on cross-portfolio and multiyear preventative opportunities. As I said, it has signalled that we have more work to do to get directorates and agencies to understand the funding stream and how they are able to use it, because it is quite different from what they are used to. Usually, funding is provided and that is it. This measure has funding with strings, and it requires integration and co-operation, so it is moving into quite a different space.

The fact that we are doing that is very important, because it changes the tone and the approach across Government and the wider public sector. We have learned some lessons this year as to how we can increase take-up going forward. As you know, we are repeating the funding in the next financial year.