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Yes. Do you want details of that?

The point that you are making is close to my heart. How do we ensure that any of the systemic and cultural changes that have happened in Government do not remain in Government? All the various public sector arms also need to appreciate and recognise what we have tried to achieve through the new deal for business. There needs to be an understanding that all parts of the public sector are also in the business of economic development.

When I came back into government last summer, I realised something. I will take energy transition as an example—it is a completely different sector, but it is, I know, an area that is close to Mr Stewart’s heart. A lot of public bodies do not see themselves as part of the energy transition, but they could make or break it. Marine Scotland, the Crown Estate, the various local authorities that have responsibility over planning, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, NatureScot and so on are all key.

This could also be applied to your pharmacy point, Mr Stewart, but organisations and public sector bodies have a duty to protect data according to the law, and to protect citizens and patients. At the same time, we have to ensure that organisations and bodies can operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. Pharmacies are a good example, because they are semi-autonomous and, in many cases, independent. If you were to introduce regulation and bureaucracy that led to them all shutting down, that would be providing the patient with a poor service at the end of the day. It is about finding that fine line in implementing laudable policy in a way that does not completely inhibit an autonomous, independent organisation such as a pharmacy from working.

That is where we are trying to create the culture change. Often, the issue is with the implementation rather than the core policy itself. We all know the various regulations and legislation that underpin data sharing, but there is a lot of freedom there, too, to put the patient at the heart of systems and to create systems that operate around the patient and enable greater data sharing.

Separate work is going on in Government. Neil Gray and I have co-chaired a number of groups involving economy and health to try to lead to some of that culture change, but I will not pretend that it is not a work in progress.

Yes, but, fundamentally, we deceive ourselves if we do not say that certain policies that are implemented for particular outcomes will not be popular in certain sectors. I do not think that any of us is saying that we expect every policy to be universally welcomed by every citizen in Scotland. That just cannot be the case.

The aim of the new deal for business is to bring business in at the beginning, to ensure that implementation is as streamlined and as straightforward as possible. That is very different from saying that every policy will be universally welcomed, especially when we are trying to achieve multiple different aims, as we are through MUP. MUP aims to reduce alcohol dependency, poor health outcomes from alcohol misuse and so on. I think that businesses are largely on board with those policy objectives, but we need to make sure that the implementation has their input.

I am sure that Dr Malik will have some thoughts to add, but I absolutely agree with that point about mainstreaming those models rather than their being an add-on. I was not here when the membership of the new deal was determined or invited, so I am not sure what the thinking was at that point as to who to involve and who not to involve. My colleagues may have thoughts on that. However, I agree with the point about mainstreaming.

As I have reiterated a few times this morning, we also need to reject the notion that the business community is homogenous and has the same views on everything. That is not the case. Business owners and workers of different kinds are citizens with lots of views on the various policies that the Government is engaged with, and we engage with them as citizens and take their views into account irrespective of their roles in business. Business is not a homogenous whole. We need to have the means to allow feedback, input and consultation and we then need to come to a conclusion that weighs all of that up, including the input from those alternative business models.

Dr Malik, do you have any thoughts on that?

It is on my agenda, because skills are very high on my agenda. We take a different approach to the apprenticeship levy here, and I would argue that businesses do see the benefit of it. They may not see the input/output equation in the same way as businesses might see it in an English context, but the funding is clearly reinvested in apprenticeships of different types—foundation apprenticeships and graduate apprenticeships—and in different skills.

Right now, we have a huge opportunity to look at the whole skills landscape and understand how it is meeting our growth objectives. We have a really good problem at the moment because we have high growth in particular sectors. We have massive potential growth in aerospace, in renewables and in other sectors. If I am engaging with a developer right now, they are saying that the scale of potential construction across Scotland makes them question whether they will be able to access the skills that they need. In other words, there is a lot of growth happening.

Graeme Dey is very involved in the conversations that we are having, and we have done specific things on the side, such as allocating £3.5 million for offshore wind. I have been working with advanced manufacturing, and we are contributing specific funding for a skills effort there. So, there are things that we are doing on the side of the general skills landscape.

Graeme Dey is keeping all of this under review, and I know that a different approach is being taken to the apprenticeship levy here, but I would argue that the benefit is still there; it is just that a business cannot see output leading to input individually.

I am not arguing about whether businesses are happy with it. My point is that the legislation is enabling legislation and there is now a duty on councils to consult well. I get a little bit sceptical when colleagues demand that central Government does not interfere with local authority decisions but then, when they are not comfortable with the way that things are going with local authorities, they come back to central Government and say, “You must change this”, or, “You must put a stop to this”.

The legislation is very broad and it allows for a number of flexibilities and exemptions that businesses are calling for. It will be the decision of local authorities as to how they design a scheme that works. There is a lot of flexibility in there. I am very alive to the fact that different local authorities and different business groups asked for different things. Some asked for a percentage, some asked for tiered rates and some asked for a flat rate. There were also other ways. Ultimately, we needed to take that into account and design a scheme that would work for the most people.

Ivan McKee is currently engaging with tourism businesses on whether anything else could be done to the legislation to make it even more flexible. There is an openness to engaging with the tourism industry right now on whether anything further could be done on the legislation. There will be a challenge if it requires primary legislation, but there is an openness there.

I go back to the consultation responses and the fact that there was a broad range of views on whether the levy should be a percentage or not, particularly as small businesses felt that a flat rate would be a disproportionate percentage of their nightly rate. That is why having as much flexibility as possible in the enabling legislation is important, but I stress that it will be for local authorities to determine whether to introduce a tourism levy and to design one that takes into account the strong feedback from businesses in the Highlands. I am very conscious that that feedback has been very strong.

I am interested in hearing Dr Malik’s thoughts on that. By and large, however, my experience of Scottish businesses is that they want to do the right thing. They see themselves as critical to the local economy, but they are very interested in how they do their business and not just in what they do. Perhaps the difference is that, in Parliament or in the public sector, we have a tendency to use terms to define a lot of things that businesses, by and large, want to do themselves. An example is single-use cups. I am very conscious that a lot of coffee shops have already made decisions to try to contribute to environmental sustainability irrespective of legislative changes. Irrespective of how people define the work that they do and the duties that you outlined, businesses want to do the right thing.

No, there will not be. The point of the new deal for business was to make systemic change. That is slightly different from setting policy outcomes; it was about processes. The next stage is that those processes should work, be effective and lead to different outcomes for Government with regard to what happens and what does not happen.

I hope that extensive engagement will continue, and that there will be different and better means by which different businesses can feed in to processes. That would be my objective.

It is a good question, and I would like to hear responses from the people on either side of me. What happens next, Judith?

I hope so, yes. That is the aim; that is the ambition. There are particular flash points where that is tested with new policies and so on. With the previous budget and the programme for government, we tried to give some breathing space, with no surprises for businesses or anything that has caught them out and so on. There is something about this being a particularly tumultuous time, and giving business some space to be able to respond to those challenges is a good thing for Government to do.