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The figures are atrocious. I point you to page 48 of the Audit Scotland report, which I flagged at a previous meeting of the Public Audit Committee. What you would normally expect to see on that page—as I am pleased to see in other tables—are little green ticks where targets have been met. However, there is not a single green tick anywhere on that page.

The numbers speak for themselves. The targets are 95 per cent, 100 per cent and 90 per cent for beginning treatment within given timescales. They are ambitious. I get that. I know that the health service is very challenging across the UK, but look at the performance measures on that page. Look at in-patient treatment within 12 weeks of a decision to treat. The poor people in Grampian are sitting at 46 per cent of the 100 per cent target. Fife and Forth Valley are at 47 per cent. For the three targets, Lanarkshire is at 61 per cent, 46 per cent and 60 per cent—nowhere near the targets. There are huge numbers of people waiting for far longer than they should, and £100 million is not going to scratch the surface, is it?

It has already been mentioned, but one of the issues at the other end is delayed discharge. We have talked a lot about the flow of people going into hospital, but getting them out is key. However, I am afraid that the statistics on that are equally atrocious. In 2023, 658,000 bed days were taken up by delayed discharge. Those are days on which beds could have been occupied by all those people who were sitting in A and E waiting to be admitted. We do not have the full statistics yet for 2024, but doing a year-on-year analysis from November to November, there was a 7 per cent increase in delayed discharge days. My fear is that the number for 2024 will not be great, either.

Of course, the Government promised to eliminate delayed discharge completely, but I do not know how on earth it thought that it was going to do that. It was an admirable ambition, but it is clearly not happening. We had a conversation earlier in which you admitted to being the accountable officer for NHS health and social care, but many of the levers that are required to deal with delayed discharge are entirely outside your control. It must be a huge source of frustration that you cannot really fix that problem, can you?

That is a whole other committee session, is it not?

Given the huge pressures that public finance is under—we have spent two hours talking about them—are you comfortable about the fact that there are civil servants working for you on theoretical white papers—13, I believe, in total? Does that sound like good use of civil service time and taxpayers’ money to you?

Ms Stafford, does anyone in the Scottish Government advise ministers on their taxation policy? Does anyone, at any point, undertake an analysis of the revenues that are achieved versus what was expected? How are we faring with that? Is the Government, through variation in taxation bands in Scotland, getting the amount of money in tax that it thought that it would? Are we looking only at tax intake, or are we looking at the bigger picture in terms of wider investment, difficulty in recruiting and all the other economic factors that sit around taxation policy, not just the numbers themselves?

Many people have lauded and applauded the decisions that have been made, and others, particularly in the business community, have criticised those decisions. I am trying to unearth how the civil service goes about advising ministers on the right course of action, or, indeed, how it flags up any areas of taxation that it thinks should perhaps be changed in the future.

That is the number of individuals; it does not necessarily equate to higher tax intake in numerical terms. You could be losing people and have more people coming in, but they are paying less tax than the people that you are losing. What does that analysis look like?

My other question is about commercial assets, so I will stop there for now and ask about that later.

You think that it is appropriate and impartial. That is your view?

Yes, but those trade-offs are often quite substantial and will come at the expense of the delivery of other worthy public services. For example, capital investments have been frozen, and there have been shifts from the rural affairs, transport and housing budgets to other portfolios where we simply cannot say no to a funding increase. Benefits have to be paid, but we can pause progress on a road project or a hospital renewal. I appreciate that those decisions are made by ministers, but what advice is given to them by the civil service on which portfolios have to be cut to fund increased expenditure in other portfolios?

Okay—I have quite a lot of ground to cover, so I will move on.

Permanent secretary, we hear frequently from ministers, in a comment or a statement—it is a matter of record in the Official Report—that the Scottish Government needs more borrowing powers. My understanding is that the Scottish Government already has a significant amount of borrowing power. Its outstanding borrowing balance is to the tune of £1.7 billion for capital borrowing and £0.5 billion for resource borrowing, which means that over £2 billion is already on the books. Of course, that amount attracts quite a large amount of interest. I understand that there has already been over £320 million of interest on those two figures combined. In the year 2023-24, borrowing repayments of £217 million were made, which is up from £160 million in the year before.

I am trying to understand where we are at with borrowing, because those sound like pretty hefty figures. Are the levels of borrowing in Scotland sustainable? Are we borrowing enough to fund capital projects, or are we borrowing too much?