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As part of the transformation of public services, that will absolutely be required and must be the key priority in the next session of the Parliament and for the next Scottish Government. If there is to be a boldness in how you deliver services, whether that is by changing the landscape of delivery or who delivers, it will require funding to be looked at in a different way. However, we need to have the blueprint of what that looks like, and then the funding needs to follow that blueprint.

It is fair to say that the college sector and Police Scotland have raised these issues. The difficulty is that it would all count against borrowing, so their construct would have to change significantly. Otherwise, it is simply part of the one cake: it does not grow the cake, and therefore I cannot see what the advantage would be. In addition, if you completely changed the status of an organisation, there would be questions about where the accountability for delivery lies. It would become a different relationship.

That is not to say that these matters should never be looked at and discussed, but there are pros and cons. We are held to account regularly about the delivery of X number of police to do whatever. If you had a very different structure—akin to complete autonomy—to enable the organisation to have a status that could borrow, you would lose some of that accountability.

I do not know whether Richard McCallum or Cathy Sumner want to come in on that. Basically, that is the point.

The figure exists, so I will write to the committee and update you on that. It is quite a small amount of money compared to the programme. It has been spent on the establishment and consultancy costs. I do not have the figure to hand.

Well, through independent contractors, yes.

Capital availability is being cut in real terms. Our capital availability is going down and you can only cut the cake according to what size the cake is. In terms of the consequentials from the UK Government, health capital was tiny, from my recollection. That is one of the reasons why we are looking at revenue-based finance for primary care facilities. The UK Government and Wes Streeting are having to do exactly the same, because the health capital allocation to the UK Department of Health and Social Care is very limited. We have to be imaginative about how the new models can be funded.

We have had a huge amount of competing demands for the capital availability. Sometimes, when I am at this committee, I am asked about roads; at other times, I am asked about local government capital or about housing. We have had to ensure that we can provide what we can. The on-going maintenance of the health estate has been a priority and the capital availability that we have is, by and large, being spent in those areas. That is why we need to look at a revenue-based finance model for a new generation of primary care facilities, and that is exactly what is going to happen in NHS England as well.

The first thing to say is that information on the expected costs and timeframes for the projects that you are referring to will be included in future infrastructure delivery pipelines once the business cases have been completed and approved. We have tried to disaggregate the projects into those for which the business cases have been completed and those for which the business cases are still being completed.

With regard to your point about construction inflation and optimism bias, the Scottish public finance manual requires that, in developing business cases, the guidance that is set out in the green book must be followed. The green book explicitly requires adjustments to be made for optimism bias.

Since the Covid period, construction inflation has been running at an extremely high level, and it is unlikely to fall back to pre-Covid levels any time soon. There is also the current global situation, which will undoubtedly not help to create a stable cost environment. People are already talking about a shortage of materials, which will drive up costs.

In theory, all those things should be nailed down, optimism bias should be built in and the contracts should be well managed, but none of us can foresee events that lead to a shortage of materials.

I can imagine it but I am not going to be here, so it will be for the next Government to make those decisions.

The spending review was an opportunity to provide a line of sight to the allocation of the resources that we had in front of us at that point. It was to give a sense of the funding outlook, with the caveat that, as everybody across the public sector understands, that outlook is only true for the point at which it is published, because the information changes. Lo and behold, it changed straight away. It was an opportunity to give a sense of the direction of travel and of the outlook. However, such an outlook will change and has changed already.

It is a priority. In addition to the employability funding, we have new funding exactly in that space, which will go to colleges to support the enhancement of their offers to the people they can bring in. That is part of the wider employability investment. Colleges are getting £8 million—it is a new fund that will be very much about helping those furthest from the labour market into work, particularly those who may find the college route less intimidating than other employability programmes. That idea came directly from the college sector, which had looked at what it could do to enhance its offer and improve the scope for getting people back into work. It is a good investment and I am looking forward to seeing how it develops over the next few years.

I am a big fan of accountants, but do we need as many? I do not want to pick on accountants. I have used health as an example, so let me return to that. We have 14 territorial boards and eight special boards—although I think that the number might be going down to seven—and they all have their own corporate functions. That situation has grown up over many years and is a result of the way in which public services develop—that is what they do. Indeed, many of them have taken on new responsibilities. All of that is understood, but the way in which the support services are delivered needs to change. That is a big area of efficiency and transformation.

That is not to say that those roles are not important. They are important, and people in front-line services could not do their job without support services. I do not want to imply in any way that those jobs are not important, but the functions can be delivered differently. We can use technology to support the delivery of those functions in a way that perhaps would have been more challenging 10 years ago. That is being done in many other sectors, and we need to harness that.