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I am not in a position to speak to that in any great detail, so could I come back to the committee with an update on compulsory sales orders? That would perhaps be in the context of the green industrial strategy and some of the reform work that is going on in planning right now, because it is not independent of the aims in the programme for government around masterplan consent areas and so on. It is all kind of part of the same world, so it might be useful to come back with more substantive information.

That is quite a remarkable way of turning a positive that we can all get behind into a negative.

We need to drill down into those numbers, and I have asked for more robust granular data, for example on where people are settling. Willie Coffey raised the point about our rural communities; I mentioned in my answer to him that we have been talking about National Records of Scotland’s forecasts, which, in essence, plateau over the next 40 years, with significant drops in rural areas and significant increases in urban areas. Those figures disrupt that general trend.

Looking at Scotland’s public services right now, my greatest worry is that it is the very people whom we need who are the most excluded by our current immigration and visa systems. That is the bottom line. Last week, Russell Findlay raised the issue of delayed discharge, which a number of people have concerns about. The big problem with delayed discharge is the workforce: right now, we know that far more people could be in the country who are excluded from it on the basis that they do not earn enough or are not considered to be skilled enough by the UK Government. That is quite an affront to them. I know that many of us entrust loved elderly relatives to such people.

On Monday, we heard that there are massive housing sites in Shetland that are ready to go, but the big problem is workforce. Quite a number of Europeans used to work in Shetland, in the construction industry in particular, but private sector construction businesses have told me that they have all now left to go home.

I agree that we have to drill down into the figures. The population figures that were published yesterday are a cause for celebration, but I would like to see higher levels of inward migration, and I think that visas have a role to play in that. I am assuming that those figures would have been collated prior to the most recent clampdown on visas and immigration.

We do not see the data in advance of it being published. It was published yesterday, I believe, and we have discussed it internally in Government. The ask has been for there to be a more granular drill-down so that that detail can be shared across cabinet secretaries and across portfolios to allow us to better understand the implications of it. I imagine that Angus Robertson would be able to return to the Parliament with more data. It is helpful to understand what is motivating people to move to Scotland and how we can build on that so that we can motivate more people to do that.

I also think that the rhetoric is important, for two reasons. First, I confess to being really disheartened when there is a constant drumbeat of negativity in our political discourse about why people should not move to Scotland. In general, what we hear from the Opposition is that everything is rubbish; points are made about tax and so on. I think that we forget that that has a negative impact on whether people want to move to the country. I have often heard it said that the negative rhetoric about tax is more off-putting than the tax itself. That has certainly been the case over the past few years. The NRS figures are interesting because they represent positive rhetoric about Scotland that we can all get behind, which, I would hope, would encourage other people to move to Scotland.

Secondly, how we respond is important. The Government is proud and delighted that there has been an increase in migration to Scotland. We want Scotland to be a welcoming place for migrants and immigrants. Given what other parties are saying about their concerns about immigration, it is so important that we stand together in Scotland and say to immigrants, “We welcome you—we want you to come here.” We recognise that there is a moral imperative for us to welcome people to Scotland; more than that, we recognise that it is an unashamed economic imperative that we do so.

If our problem has long been emigration, I hope that the way that we respond to the recent figures will reverberate across our political discourse and, perhaps, further afield, to illustrate the fact that we want people to make their home here.

Let me make a stab at that and then hand over to Richard Rollison.

That has been a very pressing issue since the Scottish National Investment Bank was established. Prior to the bank’s being established, there were extensive conversations with the UK Government and the Treasury about whether there could be any unique flexibilities for the bank within the fiscal framework. A lot of work was done to build cross-party support so that the UK Government could have the confidence that it was not a political play but was about supporting the bank on those flexibilities.

One of the big flexibilities that the bank would like to have is the ability to carry over budget across financial years. Any investment house will make decisions irrespective of where they fall in the financial year, but the lack of flexibility to carry over that is built into the fiscal framework means that, if we are nearing the end of March, there is a really difficult decision to make as to whether to accelerate an investment decision and, in the process, to carry a lot more risk, or to wait until the next financial year and carry even more risk because you do not know what the budget will be.

We have been working with the bank to consider what further flexibilities might be afforded from within the Scottish Government budget, but it is extremely difficult to see how we can do that without additional flexibility from the UK Government.

Richard—I will hand over to you for the better answer.

Yes. I could take each of the five opportunity areas, including hydrogen, and tell you about where I think we need far greater and closer collaboration with the UK Government. Carbon capture, utilisation and storage is quite an obvious area in which we ultimately need the UK Government to make an investment in Scotland’s opportunity. When it comes to some of the other areas, the big issue that people raise with me, and which they will raise with members consistently, is grid connection. More generally on where we need close collaboration, we ultimately cannot deliver the full scale of our ambition for the five opportunity areas without close alignment with UK Government strategies on them all. I suppose that that is the general gist of my response to the question.

I will give you an update. It might be helpful to remind the committee of the background of that expression of interest linked to Forsyth Black. He was the chairman of the board and resigned from it to ensure an independent and fair assessment. He stepped back from his duties immediately upon disclosing that he was linked to an expression of interest, and the Scottish Government and Prestwick airport subsequently agreed that he would have to resign rather than be temporarily removed from his post. He does not have inside knowledge of competing bids to purchase the airport, as no formal bids have been received.

I do not feel that it would be appropriate for me to share further details, including the number or identity of any other organisations behind an expression of interest, at this time. That is not to say that we cannot come back to Parliament when there is something on which to update you in due course.

As you can imagine, when it comes to spending any penny at the moment, we must take a very robust approach to the impact that a policy or person has. I am hugely enthusiastic about the work that Mark Logan is doing. The work that he was originally tasked with concerned the network of Techscalers and increasing the pipeline of entrepreneurship and of business start-ups.

The track record of Techscalers has been really inspiring. That major piece of infrastructure has been delivered without much fanfare or noise, and it has not been subject to too many parliamentary questions, nor have too many concerns been raised by Opposition MSPs, because that work has been really successful, and it has exceeded the initial expectations that were set down for numbers of businesses and for the amount of additional funding that businesses have leveraged in. My hope is that that will continue to grow.

I have been very impressed with the metrics. Mark Logan is now working in another area: he is working closely with Neil Gray to deliver more innovation in the national health service. Within a matter of months, I have already seen a step change in some of the work that the NHS is doing in taking some of the most exciting innovations in the life sciences sector and ensuring that there is an open door in the NHS to embed that. From a health service perspective, some of the results are astonishing. One outcome, for example, is that the digital dermatology project can cut waiting lists significantly.

It might be helpful to the committee if I were to write more formally to outline what we think the successes have been of having someone in that adviser role who understands the private sector, who has the confidence of the public sector and who brings a different way of thinking to the work that we are doing on innovation in the public sector.

I will give an update on some of the main recommendations. One of Audit Scotland’s recommendations was about political leadership. We did a quick review of governance to look at how we could further strengthen political leadership. On 24 September, the First Minister formally agreed to the creation of a Cabinet sub-committee on investment and the economy, which provides political oversight, with membership across the Cabinet table.

With regard to other recommendations, we have identified additional metrics that can be used to better track outputs and medium-term delivery. Some of that work was already happening—for example, Techscaler data on the spread and impact of member businesses is gathered regularly. The majority of our metrics show positive change, and that was highlighted in the second annual report on NSET. The measures that have been selected for the strategy help us to track progress towards the long-term transformational changes that we seek for our economy. We have monthly metrics that look at things such as gross domestic product growth and job creation, although they are not owned by the NSET team. I do not know whether the committee has seen them yet, but I was heartened to see that the figures that the Royal Bank of Scotland released today show an acceleration in job creation. There are some real positives in that regard.

That also covers evaluation. Audit Scotland recognised that it was too early to assess the impact of NSET, but a section was added to the most recent NSET annual report to discuss the results of early evaluation work.

That covers quite a number of the high-level recommendations that Audit Scotland made.

That is another reason, which I did not give to Colin Smyth, for my strong reluctance to put figures on the finance, because we recognise other partners in the aims of the national strategy for economic transformation, including local authorities and parts of the private sector.

That is where regional economic partnerships come in, because they are partnerships, and I have had extensive engagement with them over the past few months. Just on Monday, I was in Shetland—I was concerned that I might not get back in time for this committee meeting, because I was in Shetland until yesterday afternoon. On Monday, there was the convention of the Highlands and Islands, which is a grouping including all the local authorities that represent coastal areas, stretching from North Ayrshire up to Shetland. Half of the agenda was dedicated to the work of the Highlands and Islands regional economic partnership, which is engaged in attracting new businesses and delivering housing. On a much more nimble, flexible and local level, that group is able to look at similar issues across those areas and work together to find solutions.

I was very clear with the group that I would love NSET to be a very localised strategy, so that the Government at the higher level is an enabler of what goes on locally. At a local level, I would like those partnerships to identify their big priorities and get on with the job, with the confidence of their communities and with the support of national agencies—in that case, Highlands and Islands Enterprise—and, ultimately, with my support. I would like them to do that along the lines of the NSET pillars, because the overarching NSET aims are just as relevant as they were a couple of years ago.

It might be worth saying that, when the strategy was published, there was real pushback about the fact that we had not name checked every sector under the sun, but my view was always that the aims should be sector-neutral. Again, on the point about innovation, the aims should be applicable equally to any sector. If a local regional economic partnership says that its priorities relate to energy—as is the case in the Highlands and Islands, because that is quite obvious—those aims should apply to that industry.