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Good morning to our witnesses and thank you for giving up your time to join the committee. Thank you for your opening remarks. There is a lot of challenge in what you have already said and there are many areas for the committee and, as Davie Donaldson said in his final comments, for the Government and the country more generally to work on.

Many of the witnesses have talked about the work that local authorities do and the services that they provide, whether that is individually or through COSLA. The action plan mentions the need for close partnership working. There are different levels of responsibility between local government and the Scottish Government, but third sector organisations also play a crucial role.

What are we getting right with partnership working and, more importantly, what are we getting wrong, and what do we need to fix? I will ask each of you in turn. A couple of you have already talked about monitoring and evaluation needing to be comparable across the country, for example. I am interested in specific examples, if you have them and are prepared to talk about them. I will go to Suzanne Munday first.

Thanks—that is really helpful.

Lynne has just spoken about top-down directives and the mismatch or disconnect with the local level. Maureen, you spoke in your opening remarks about the curriculum not necessarily being relevant to a Traveller community’s lives and their experience. Can you give us other examples or explain a little more how we have not got that right?

Getting that right will be a significant challenge for education across the board.

Leslie, you, too, have talked about education and continuity of services. How could we use partnership working better to build continuity and embed it in the design of our services and functions? How does that sort of thing play out, and how does it support the young people with whom you work?

Thanks—that is really helpful.

Lynne, can I have your comments on that too, please?

I see the care economy as being about more than just giving people the care that they need so that they can go out to work, but I take your point that it is part of a much wider situation and connects to other things.

It is good to see renewable energy, heat in buildings and decarbonising transport being highlighted as opportunities in the strategy, but how will constrained public funding be structured to enable action in those plans and the delivery that you have spoken about?

That answer is really helpful, and it highlights why I linked those two points. I was thinking about the ability to see the connections between negative or detrimental consequences and supporting those who can mitigate such consequences, thinking about the circular economy in a way that we have not seen previously with this type of strategic investment. I look forward to your update next year.

Good morning, cabinet secretary. Thank you for your opening remarks. I will follow on from Jamie Halcro Johnston’s question on measurement. I am interested in exploring two areas, one of which is around the indicators of progress, and measurement feeds into that. Obviously, the inclusive development index is welcome, but how can we take it further to measure intrinsic environmental wellbeing and, importantly, to include the benefits of a care economy? That is implicit in the document, but it does not come out as a significant single thing by itself.

Thank you for expressing your willingness to come back to us. I appreciate that and I know that others on the committee would appreciate regular engagement with you.

Following on from Fiona Hyslop and Colin Beattie’s points earlier, I appreciate that it is early days but I am interested in exploring the challenges that you face in meeting the strategic objectives. There will be a limit to the life of some of those projects, and challenges in relation to them. What do you need to overcome those challenges?

My next question is linked to that, although it deals with a slightly separate matter. Given the overarching purpose of the bank and its strategic objectives, it is clear that good examples of sustainable development are offered by the bank, but those projects—some more notably than others—could have negative social and/or environmental consequences. In your longer-term thinking about the life cycle of a project and the consequences thereafter, do you consider circular economy spin-offs or building in the initial aims across the full lifetime of the project?

Pauline, could I bring you in to answer the question on the physical and mental consequences for disabled people and for the people around them?

I want to follow up on the topic that you both started to explore with Alexander Stewart—financial security—but from the point of view of education and training. Jenny Miller spoke about the poverty trap and people not having access to a range of employment options or having to curtail their paid work because of caring responsibilities. There is also the issue of people curtailing other opportunities, such as skills development, training and education opportunities. I ask Jenny Miller and then Pauline Nolan to say a little more about the impacts on access to education, skills and training that carers and disabled people experienced during the pandemic.