Seòmar agus comataidhean

I will stick to that and write later to the minister about the outrageous salary of the principal of City of Glasgow College.

The Auditor General’s recent reports on the gap between policy ambition and delivery will, I think, resonate with us all. Those reports also relate to the issue of fiscal sustainability that the committee has been wrestling with, as has the Government.

The issue is relevant to this inquiry, because it relates to the issue of churn in the civil service. Part of that is about civil servants being spread increasingly thinly and being moved from one team to another because new initiatives and policies are adopted. That creates not just a lack of capacity but a lack of expertise and, potentially, in some cases, a lack of the robust advice that ministers might want.

I will round all that up into one question. Is the Scottish Government overcommitted? Are we trying to do too much with the resources that we have, which is resulting in the gap between ambition and what is being delivered?

My point is more that it appears that some of the decisions that were made in the EBR to withdraw and cut services have not had a negative impact on outcomes, which begs the question as to whether those services were the right thing to be spending money on in the first place. The RSR was the kind of exercise that should have identified that and that should have been asking those value-for-money questions. In relation to quite a lot of the services that were on the EBR list, that had not been done in the RSR, or it had been done and the decision had been taken that each service was value for money. Then, through the EBR, we decided that the services were not value for money or that they did not have enough value for money to justify continuing them. Does that not indicate that the RSR exercise did not achieve all its objectives?

On the point about the underspend, I am interested in whether the Government thinks that there is a presentation issue, because the single biggest chunk of the underspend related to variation in the student loan market—not a pot of cash that went unspent. We regularly have stakeholders engage with us who are frustrated that their priority did not get the spending that they believe that it deserves, and they see reports that £2 billion was not spent. Is there a basic presentational issue with regard to the terminology when we talk about underspend?

The resource spending review last year was supposed to get us towards a point of fiscal sustainability. Obviously, that happened during a period where inflation continued to rise. Nonetheless, reflecting on the fact that we had the RSR in the summer and then an emergency budget review and a second round of additional savings in the autumn, it appears that quite a lot of what was in the EBR probably could have been in the resource spending review. Has there been any lessons learned exercise around why the RSR did not generate some of the savings in the EBR that, certainly when I was looking at them, felt very obvious? Some of what was in the EBR was painful and difficult, but not all of it was.

I will drill down on that a little bit. I will try to be brief. Would the outcomes be better if the Scottish Government was doing less, but doing each of those initiatives with more resources available to it? At the moment, there is a huge number of priorities spread across a range of initiatives, and we know that there is a gap between ambition and outcome. Would the outcomes across the board, particularly in relation to child poverty and net zero, be better if there were fewer but better resourced programmes?

From a policy perspective, I completely agree with everything that you have said, and I accept your point that we should not, in general, see this as a unit price thing. However, for the purposes of the financial memorandum, we need to. For the sake of clarification, then, can I confirm that, as far as the costings in the financial memorandum for the additional hearings are concerned, it is assumed that the unit price is essentially the same as the unit price of the current average in the hearing system—or is it more?

Thanks very much. That is all from me.

I have a couple of questions on the increase in the number of cases that will go through the hearings system and the relative cost.

There have been some suggestions—and agreement—that the number of hearings will increase and that the complexity of the additional cases will be greater on average than that of existing cases that are in the system. That has raised questions about the averaged-out cost per hearing. Could you clarify whether it is assumed that the cost of the additional hearings will average out at the same cost as the hearings that are currently in the system? If so, how do you respond to the suggestion that those hearings are likely to be more complex? If you have a different cost average for the hearings, can you expand on how you came to it?

I have a final brief question. I was glad to welcome the minister’s response to my question about secure transport at last week’s meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee and the comment that the Government is considering either amendments to the bill in order to reflect that or taking measures in that area in one form or another. However, will that be taken into account in revising the financial memorandum? Various submissions have suggested that savings could be made in the area of secure transport provision through, for example, creating secure transport provision in Scotland. Indeed, we have previously discussed how most of that provision comes from England.

The flip side, though, of trying to raise standards in secure transport provision is that it could have additional costs. It would therefore be of interest to Parliament if it had some indication of the financial implications of changes to secure transport provision. I accept that a decision has not yet been made on what those changes will be, but can you just confirm that the financial memorandum will take that into account?