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That is absolutely something that we can and will raise—I will certainly raise it—with the minister.

I just want to check something. In the meetings that you have had with the minister and with the First Minister, have they given you any indication that there will be a full response to the “Paving the Way” report coming on their part, or do they consider events since then to have somewhat superseded it?

Again, we can raise that, so it is really useful to put it on the record.

My question follows on quite neatly from Ben McPherson’s question about consultation, co-design and engagement. As you said, not everyone in the care community will want to engage at a national level on questions of policy and legislation, but we are looking for examples of good practice. Can we draw on the practice of any local authorities or other public bodies that are engaging within their sphere and remit and doing it well?

I very much welcome the instrument, and I think that it will go some way towards resolving some concerns. However, I am interested in what the process of escalation would be. You will be familiar with the current issues at the City of Glasgow College. That is what has caused me to ask the question, but I am asking it in a general sense, because I think that it applies to more colleges than just that one, particularly where colleges sit under the regional board in Glasgow or Lanarkshire.

There are still questions from unions about how they should escalate an issue if they are unable to resolve it with college management. What is the role of the college board, the regional board, the Scottish Funding Council and you in that? Will you explain how a trade union that has been unable to resolve an issue directly with management should go about escalating it? I am sure that, as MSPs, we all get lobbied by unions on a variety of issues in this regard, often with a variety of suggestions about whether the issue should go straight to the SFC, straight to you or straight to the college board—or, in some cases, the regional board. What process should be followed if there is a concern about redundancies, particularly when the correct process has not been followed?

What was the UK Government’s rationale for that approach to capital borrowing? I am not asking you to break any confidences, but it is useful for the committee to understand the extent to which there were competing public policy objectives and to know where the balance of power lies in the context of partisan politics.

Thanks for that. Now that—

Is there any shift in the Scottish Government’s strategic priorities for capital spend directly from the block grant, as opposed to what goes on regarding borrowing? In other words, what would the Government consider by way of capital projects that are appropriate for borrowing, as opposed to the funding coming straight from the direct capital grant? Is that position essentially unchanged following the agreement?

I will return to the convener’s line of questioning about the changes to capital borrowing limits and apologise if you covered this in your answer to the convener and I missed it. Given the point that was made about the extent to which capital inflation has gone far beyond not only the GDP deflator but also measures of consumer inflation, was there any discussion of backdating for a year or two, in order to apply even the GDP deflator, never mind the level that capital inflation is actually at?

That is really useful to know. It is helpful for us to understand that, from the UK Government’s perspective, the negotiation was not just about the well-trodden constitutional ground of where power lies; it was also about the UK Government’s policies in relation to debt and deficit and the contributions that are made to address them.

On the point that you have just made about the impact of capital borrowing on the resource budget, neither of those budgets is particularly positive for the Scottish Government over the next couple of years. What is the practical effect of the gradual increase in the capital borrowing limit on what the Parliament should expect to see? The expectation is that the capital budget will not offer a particularly rosy picture. Does that fundamentally alter anything? It has already been discussed that the current level is nowhere near where capital inflation is at, and we are already at a point at which we cannot do everything that, a couple of years ago, we thought that we would be able to do. What should the Parliament expect the effect to be on budgets over the remainder of the parliamentary term?

I accept that time pressures and workload are the major concerns, but the awareness point has also come up quite a few times—not just in relation to Education Scotland. In a lot of the reviews that have taken place recently, the feedback from classroom teachers is, “Well, nobody asked me for my input on that.” As far as the people who were running the reviews were concerned, they distributed all the material to local authorities and schools, but it had not filtered down. Is there an issue with the structures that our national bodies use to communicate directly with teachers? Does a structure for enough direct communication not exist? Does communication go through too many layers of filtering?