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Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I want to explore, first of all, who you report to and the ways in which you are reporting to the Government on this. How frequently are you doing that and what are you providing the Government with?

Does that monthly update include all your management information data, or is it just a free-form textual?

Okay. What feedback are you getting?

What would be your assessment for the people watching this session? You are probably aware that there are some members of the public here. Will they be more or less confident about their particular situation after this session?

In terms of trust—a word that my colleague Liz Smith mentioned—pensions, more than any other benefit, talk to trust in the state. When people have contributed throughout their entire working life, nothing diminishes trust more than an issue with their pension. Looking back, you mentioned that, historically, there has not been the required investment in the agency, particularly in automation and digitisation. How has that impacted the trust of the population in a critical state benefit?

Therefore, will you be applying even more caution to any subsequent commitments and promises that you make? Part of the issue, particularly with the most recent October date, is that people have been blowing a gasket, in effect, when they have been told and they have been hanging on. I, too, have many constituents—quite a case load of people—who are affected in this way. Part of it is the death by a thousand cuts when they are hanging on, and then they are told, “No, we are not going to meet that deadline either.”

Good morning. I, too, want to qualify anything that I might say by making it clear that I am not a lawyer. If you think that I have asked a ridiculous question, please suppress your laughter.

I have been wondering about the definition of a digital asset. I know that you will have considered the advent of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, where an asset might be part of the whole generative thing. As a result, it will be evolving—it will never be the same thing twice. That whole part of a particular package might have some definition or some descriptor around it, but it could be eternally evolving. At the point at which the packet transfer takes place, the packet will be the descriptor of the generative AI piece of technology, and that will be the only thing that we will have to hang on to.

How do you square off that kind of situation with your definitions thus far? I appreciate that you have taken cognisance of that by making things as simple as possible, because we do not know what we do not know. However, that is, I think, one of the key challenges, and, indeed, we are not that far away from that.

I hope that I have been sort of clear.

I can see how you are making that backwards link into other areas of law at present, but I still think that there is a potential challenge. Something would be flushed out if there was intrinsic value—somebody would come forward; that is the nature of it. However, if there is something that lets in the amorphous thing that is constantly changing, I think that it will be very hard, unless somebody steps forward with regard to believing in intrinsic value or it butts into other areas of law.

I do not expect you to have the answer to that, because we do not even have the questions. I suppose that it is about fleshing out sufficient flexibility in what has been determined thus far to at least take account of what we think that we are starting to imagine some of the issues might be. It sounds like you are more confident about that.

The latest version of the ministerial code came in under the current First Minister, but I note that, of course, the need for integrity and to declare friendships was in place well before 2018. In that respect, it is of interest to the committee to understand what advice was proffered, so that we can understand the decision making at that point. I ask because one of the critical issues is the independence, or not, of public inquiries. We have talked about that quite a lot in terms of costs. There is also the matter of the influence of ministers and the Government, which is an important part of maintaining trust. Therefore, any further information about the advice that was proffered would be appreciated.

I just want to pick up on one point. I do not disagree with what you have said in this respect, Deputy First Minister. I simply make this point: how can it be possible that we credit judges, who are incredibly learned in their field, with having the type of programme management skills and experience that are needed? That does not seem to be fair to them.

You made a comment earlier, which has just jumped into my head, about the issue of change control. I have been a programme manager, and there is no walk of life other than inquiries where we set someone loose with an unlimited budget and without support. We do not even have processes yet whereby we have a fixed project management office that can assist and guide these things. That is ultimately quite unfair to judges, when we look at their skill set, and it is inconceivable that that would happen in any other type of project. It just seems ridiculous.