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The fundamental challenge with some of the discussion is that, if we are more effective at serving the citizens, by extension, we will have more efficient public bodies. What is not to appreciate about improving outcomes for citizens and businesses and ensuring that every penny of resource that we spend delivers our objectives?

I think that the greatest contributor to child poverty over the past 10 years has been UK Government austerity, and that view has been backed up most recently by a report from the University of Glasgow. We will do all we can to mitigate it, but we are limited in what we can do. We will continue to invest our money through a different approach to social security, but, ultimately, much of what we spend is on mitigation. If you fix that issue at source, we could probably redeploy the funding elsewhere.

That is a statement of fact, yes.

No, that is a very reasonable assumption to make. My question to you would be: if I had given significant increases on the four lines that you are asking about, would you have been here asking me about four other lines that had been severely cut?

It is unlikely that we will see that in the NHS. I have intentionally set out a flexible approach because we know that some parts of the public sector have grown and probably will need to grow further. For example, the national care service will need to be able to employ people and expand in some areas flexibly.

Other parts of the public sector will no longer need to maintain the Covid-related expansion of the workforce. Rather than taking a UK Government approach to this, which is to put arbitrary figures on it—I think that its figure for bringing staff numbers down to 2016 levels is 91,000 full-time equivalent—we have said that we will freeze the pay bill. That does not equate to a freeze in pay levels; we want to work with employers and trade unions during the next few months in advance of the budget to understand how we can manage workforce numbers in a flexible way that will allow some parts of the public sector, such as the health service, to continue to grow where it needs to grow, and other areas to decrease their staff figures when they do not need those post-Brexit, post-pandemic levels of staffing.

No, that is not my position. Those are forecasts from the SFC. I believe that the £3.5 billion is actually our figure, which was published in December and which was based on a number of assumptions. The point that I was making in my answer to you, and which was made in the First Minister’s answer, was that we are now working with a resource spending review that is completely balanced. It is factually inaccurate to suggest that the resource spending review is not balanced, because I must balance it by law.

The gap between spending and funding, based on the RSR framework, which was published in December, has come to the fore again in recent days. That projection was based on, for example, inflation at 3.7 per cent and 2 per cent thereafter, and on social care growth in line with the 2018 medium-term financial strategy. It was based on a whole number of assumptions, and, in a sense, the resource spending review is the answer to a lot of those assumptions, and is based on more accurate information.

I am very clear that the suggestion, based on forecasts in advance of the publication of the resource spending review, that there is a deficit in the resource spending review is inaccurate.

We do not use figures in that way. The SFC updates its forecasts in the weeks in advance of the resource spending review publication, and then we have to balance our spending commitments. There has been so much change between December and the SFC finalising its forecasts a few weeks ago that it is just inaccurate to suggest that we go back to December figures.

All decisions around how local government spends its money are for local government to make. As you well know, I do not tell local government how to spend the core budget—that is entirely up to it.

It is across the public sector, and I have not put a figure on it. That is your figure—or other people’s. I have suggested that we need to get back to pre-Covid levels.

However, let us take the expansion of early learning and childcare, which is one area of local government. The policy has seen a workforce expansion in local government and that needs to continue. However, in other areas of the public sector—it is for the public sector to answer this question—as a result of Covid, there might have been an increase in head count that they no longer need. There may be other parts of local government, as in other parts of the public sector, that will need to see increases as we come out of the pandemic. That is why we are being very flexible.

In the discussion around public sector efficiency, local government is unique, because ultimately, it is local government that makes the decisions, rather than me. I set the spending parameters; I do not dictate to local government how to spend that money.

Those are great questions. On your first point, one of the actions is to develop a wellbeing economy monitor. That will bring in measurements of, for example, healthy life expectancy, fair work indicators, mental wellbeing, child poverty, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity. It goes back to a previous question to which I responded. The measurements are key, so what we measure really matters. We are one of the founding Governments of the wellbeing economy Governments initiative, working with countries such as New Zealand to improve our measurement of wellbeing, because we talk about trying to build a wellbeing economy but the measurement of it is really important.

Some elements of that will align with other metrics that we already work to. We have metrics in place around biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions—obviously—and child poverty. The point is to ensure that economic activity is certainly not undermining efforts on those issues but, more than that, is contributing to addressing them.

On your second point, about care, as you say, the strategy is a fairly short document. We could have taken the approach, which might have been quite popular, of listing everything that we think people would like to see name checked. However, there is reference to the importance of care in achieving all our economic aims.

It is an economic strategy, not a care strategy. However, going back to my favourite subject of entrepreneurship and the fact that certain groups are still underrepresented, the strategy specifically says that, in order to provide those underrepresented groups with more exposure to entrepreneurship and mentorship and more encouragement and support to build businesses and so on, we need to understand what is stopping them.

Let us take women as an example. Obviously, it is not just women who have caring responsibilities, by any means, but supporting women to be entrepreneurs probably means providing enhanced wraparound care support. Where individuals have caring responsibilities, how do we ensure that there is wraparound support to help them with those responsibilities? The strategy identifies the fact that, if we are serious about supporting those with caring responsibilities in either a paid or unpaid capacity, we need to do more as a Government to provide that wraparound care.

That sits alongside a lot of other things that are going on, such as the establishment of the national care service and improving terms and conditions and pay for our carers, but that is where it is referenced in the strategy.