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I draw a distinction between funding that is spent on digital infrastructure and funding that is spent on technological advancement or digital innovation. We are spending considerable sums of money on the reaching 100 per cent programme. We expect R100 contracts to connect more than 112,000 premises across Scotland before 2028.

The bit that I am more interested in, and that I think you are more interested in, if I am reading you correctly, is innovation. There has been a huge amount of work on that, and one of my priorities is to try to support innovation in the NHS. Neil Gray and I are both leading on that. In a matter of weeks after I came into the Government, we established a round table with a lot of the NHS boards, including the key procurement people in the NHS boards, and some of the most exciting businesses that are working in life sciences, supported by university research and development centres and so on.

The issue that came through from those in life sciences was that their biggest challenge is access to the NHS, and the NHS said that its biggest challenge is that it has to do things in a way that enjoys the public’s support and confidence, so it needs to interact with research and development in a sensitive and careful way. However, some significant progress on innovation in the NHS has come from those conversations.

I talked briefly about the digital dermatology programme, which has been months in the making. It was launched this month and is due to be embedded in 90 per cent of Scotland during the next few months. Use of that technology will massively reduce waiting times for dermatology appointments. The point about that story is that I am not talking about something really exciting in the life sciences sector that is still years away from implementation; that programme is being implemented now.

Technology is one of the most compelling answers to the challenges faced by our NHS. Similar technological advancement is going on for treatment for cancer and diabetes, and we are at the stage of that being implemented in one health board with a view to its being rolled out across all health boards. Mark Logan is supporting that work, and he is bringing his style of thinking to the work of the NHS.

We certainly moved away from the idea of the business hub, because we wanted to integrate that in the general ecosystem instead of having one site. That decision was based on feedback from women working in that sector.

On the issue of budget decisions, we will continue investing as much as we can in our overall work on digital technology. We have announced a number of funds since 2021 and are investing in female entrepreneurship through every budget, so there is no £50 million pot waiting to be drawn from.

It would be more appropriate to put that question to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, but I am very conscious of the impact on the businesses and organisations that I represent at the Cabinet table. His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has done work on the impact on behaviour, particularly on net migration to Scotland. I also believe that statistics on population were published yesterday, and it is important that we take them into account, too.

My answer is yes, the Scottish Government keeps behavioural impact under review. Indeed, it must do so, because the Scottish Fiscal Commission models the behavioural impact of every tax rate. It often bypasses people—though not this committee, I am sure—that the Scottish Fiscal Commission, when it puts together its figures for what it assumes the Scottish Government will raise through a particular income tax change, models the behavioural impact. As you will see, the SFC’s tables model what the Scottish Government is set to gain if all things remain equal, and what it will actually receive, taking behavioural impact into account.

He is a civil servant.

I am delighted to return to an area on which we had an exchange in the past and to repeat why I do not believe that it is appropriate to associate a single line of budget to the NSET programme. I very much respect the fact that Colin Smyth has a different view on that, and I very much respect the comments that Audit Scotland has made, but I am afraid that I am just not going to change my mind on the suggestion that we have one budget line associated with NSET, because that would completely undermine my view of NSET, which is that it should be for all Government to deliver.

I have just given an example about the work that is being done on innovation in the health service, and it is self-evident that that would not be included in a single budget line on NSET. The minute that we resort to the siloed approach on budgets, we will have completely eliminated the core purpose of NSET, which is to try to deliver economic prosperity across the Government.

In June, we published our second annual progress report, which lists all the actions that have been delivered and sets out what stage we are at in the NSET programme. However, I assume that you are talking about the Audit Scotland report.

We have had a debate about the best way to monitor spend. We have taken the recommendations on board and have delivered quite a number of them. We might just have a difference of opinion on how to do some of them, such as the finance recommendation, as effectively as possible. If you want to put any others to me directly, I can respond to them.

Thank you very much—that is a brilliant question. When the NSET was published, I made the comment that, with a 10-year strategy, there were elements of risk, because none of us knew what the next year would hold. When we reflect on the past two years, we can see that there has been quite a lot of turbulence and change. There is an element of risk attached to anything that you put down in the NSET as fact. That is why it was so important, in this year’s programme for government, to refocus on what we will do in the coming year that is in the spirit of NSET.

I will ask whether any of my officials want to come in on the green industrial strategy. By the time that I came into office, the strategy was drafted and ready to go. My main changes to it were about focusing as much as possible on action. That meant taking what the green industrial strategy contained and asking, “So what?” and “What does that mean?”

My understanding of the green industrial strategy was very much that it was a prospectus approach, so its audience is those who are interested in or open to doing business in Scotland and considering making investments. It needs to sit alongside other documents. I see the NSET document as being owned by everyone, whoever you are—whether you are a local councillor, the First Minister or somebody who employs people in Scotland. It is a national document that gives us a northern light for the next 10 years.

Within that approach, we then publish more focused documents or strategies. The green industrial strategy was punchy and pointed. It was written for a potential investor audience rather than for all our other audiences, and it must sit alongside other documents.

I wonder whether somebody else wants to speak to the process or how the strategy evolved, because I was not involved.

My portfolio—perhaps uniquely in Government—is one of the few that can generate revenue. I agree that investing through the enterprise agencies and the Scottish National Investment Bank is a means of, first, generating more medium-term immediate returns and, secondly, supporting a growing and prosperous economy more generally.

I agree with the premise that there is a difference between supporting the enterprise agencies in their current form and giving them the capital for them to be able to invest in other organisations. In recent years, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Scottish National Investment Bank have made a number of extremely good investments that have delivered returns for them. Those returns are immediate but, more generally, they are a means of delivering overall prosperity.

I strongly believe in listening to stakeholders but also in basing policy decisions on evidence. The First Minister has said, and I repeat, that we cannot continually raise tax.

You have raised the issue of the differential, which is key in a devolved context. I point to the evidence. We know from the HMRC figures that there has been net immigration to Scotland of, on average, more than 4,000 every year since tax was devolved. The member will say that the figures do not cover this year, and he will be absolutely right—although, to be fair, he has been saying that the differential will have an impact for all the years for which we have evidence. The evidence matters.

I also point to the data that was released just yesterday on Scotland’s population: it is a matter of great encouragement that it rose faster in the year up to mid-2023 than at any time since the 1940s. National Records of Scotland said that the main driver of population growth over the period was people moving to Scotland from other parts of the UK and abroad, which, again, illustrates the fact that we have net inward migration.

We must balance all the many reasons why someone would choose to live in Scotland. Although tax clearly plays a role, people take much broader decisions in the round about the general cost of living, the resilience of our public services, the support from Government and other parts of the public sector, and the economic activity that is happening here. All those are reasons to celebrate the fact that people are choosing to move to the country.