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Okay. It would be good to change the 64 figure to whatever the pension age is. Is it 67? I am trying not to think about that.

Thank you. I will open up the session. The first colleague to ask questions will be Daniel Johnson, to be followed by Michelle Thomson.

You will be glad to know that there will be questions. Obviously, I am not going to hog things too much, because time will be against us today more than I had hoped.

My first question is about the fact that you intend to publish one of those reports every five years. The Office for Budget Responsibility first started producing such reports in 2011 and has been producing them every year. Given the fact that there can be significant changes within a five-year period—such as a change of Government, a pandemic or Brexit—do you think that, in the future, you will look at changing that frequency? Rather than the reports being produced on a set timeframe, might you produce them in response to specific events?

From a personal perspective, I think that that would be very healthy. I see that Liz Smith is nodding, which is probably because we both submitted questions on that topic for First Minister’s question time this Thursday. Liz beat me to it and was selected to ask one, which I hope to come in on the back of.

That is certainly a good starting point, you are right. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has reviewed it and also sees it as being very positive. It talks about other things being added. As well as climate change, which you mentioned, it suggests health and poverty. The OECD also looked at intergenerational fairness, which economists talk about a lot but perhaps not many other people do—certainly not as many as should.

I asked about the five-year situation because paragraph 2.15 of the SFC’s report says that, in August 2022, the forecast was that the Scottish population would fall to 4.6 million by 2072, yet only six months later the projection is that Scotland’s population will fall less, to 5.1 million, by that time. That is good news, but it is a dramatic change in six months, so one wonders how seriously the forecast should be taken, given that it is a 50-year projection. Who knows what bumps will come along the road? It is difficult to see whether the forecasts should be taken as seriously as—well, not quite tablets of stone, but it is hard to see how seriously they should be taken.

I think that it is an excellent and thought-provoking report. I have to be honest with you. The things that we have discussed are just wee tweaks that would be helpful.

A key aspect that the committee has talked about over the years, including with the SFC, is productivity. You look at that primarily from a demographic perspective and you say that, under current projections, Scotland’s productivity level is likely to continue to be below that of the UK far into the future. What impact would an increase in productivity of just 0.1 per cent have? What role does policy have in increasing our productivity?

On health, we need lifestyle changes, whether that involves tobacco, drink or the food that we eat. In North Ayrshire, where I live, the average age at which a person tips over from good health into bad health is 56. In the future, people may live 10 years longer but, for six or seven of those years, they might be in bad health. We need to ensure that, if people live 10 years longer, they actually live for 12 years in better health, so that we increase the healthy age even outwith the additional lifespan. That is where the prevention agenda comes in.

I thank everyone for their thought-provoking contributions. I apologise for the fact that some members have left—that is because they have been invited to lunch with the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. It is unfortunate that this session coincided with that.

We have been trying to plug tomorrow’s seminar; I will give it another plug now. It will start at 8.30 tomorrow. There will be bacon rolls and an interesting presentation by Graeme Roy on the fiscal sustainability report. There will, no doubt, be many good questions from those who attend.

I thank the witnesses very much.

Before I close the meeting, I put on the public record my thanks to our colleagues from the Welsh Finance Committee, which hosted the second meeting of the interparliamentary finance committee forum on Friday. It was extremely interesting and valuable to hear about some of the common challenges that we face in undertaking scrutiny on a cross-party basis. I thank the clerks for their hard work and patience on the Thursday and the Friday; I think that they have aged significantly as a result of that trip. We have published a short statement on the meeting.

I close this meeting.

The next item on our agenda is an evidence session with the Scottish Fiscal Commission on its “Fiscal Sustainability Report”, which was published last week. From the Scottish Fiscal Commission, I welcome Professor Graeme Roy, chair; Professor David Ulph, commissioner; and John Ireland, chief executive. I intend to allow around 75 minutes for the session. Before we move to questions from the committee members, I invite Professor Graeme Roy to make a short opening statement.

Mark Taylor, you talked about what goes well and what does not go so well. Do you think that it is because of politics that the emphasis is on what goes wrong, rather than on trying to bolster what is, perhaps, going well and working fairly smoothly in the Government? I am talking not necessarily about the party-political aspect but about what happens in departments and the Government as a coherent unit.

When I was in Glasgow City Council, if people wanted to apply for a grant, they were much more likely to get it if they put the word “workshop” somewhere in their application. Communication is key.

If you could implement one improvement to Government decision making, what would it be?

One of the things that the civil servants said often frustrated them about their departmental remit was the lack of capacity—in terms of expertise and numbers of people—to deliver some of the things that the Government wants and, indeed, the public and other bodies demand.

You also touched on prevention, and Ben Thurman talked about horizontal working. This committee and the Scottish Government have wrestled with that for well over a decade. As Mark Taylor said, because people are looking for instant results, it is very difficult for Government to persuade organisations to disinvest in one area in order to invest in another that might have more effective results in the long term. How do we square that circle in a situation where resources are not increasing?