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“I have given up” is not a good start.

Okay. I will now open out the session to Daniel Johnson, first of all, to be followed by Ross Greer.

I prefer a dodecahedron to a circular cycle. What you are really saying is that the system is three dimensional, but it is portrayed as being two dimensional.

That said, you have also made a number of criticisms of the UK Government, which we will not go into here. I note, though, the issue of diseconomies of scale with regard to decision making and your comment that, because of their relative size, Wales and Scotland perhaps have a greater opportunity than the UK to work in partnership with stakeholders.

I have one final question before I open things up. In the last sentence of your report, just before the references, you talk about

“how the Scottish Government could change in relation to what is feasible rather”

than

“restate the value of simplified models that do not exist.”

What would you change in that respect?

I thank Professor Cairney for his evidence this morning and his excellent report.

I wonder how that would work here, in reality. It depends on who is doing the scoring.

I mentioned the BBC to colleagues before the public session started. It is quite easy for reputations to disappear or be damaged almost overnight, to a degree.

I am jumping about a bit here, because the report is so interesting—I could spend the whole time asking loads of questions, but colleagues will want to come in, and they always get narky if I take too long at the start—I think that John Mason may agree.

You say in the report that the new public management approach did not succeed even according to the objectives that it set for itself, which is an interesting point.

I will highlight one of the issues. We can have all the great theories that we like and all the structures that we want to implement, but the important thing is to have capacity. You ask,

“Does the Scottish Government have sufficient policy capacity?”,

and you look at generalist civil servants versus specialisms. You talk about leadership training and how much capacity exists even outside the civil service for Government to tap into. You also mention

“the risk of ineffective government when policy capacity and training does not live up to the Scottish Government’s ... expectations”

and the expectations of the people whom it represents. Where are we at with capacity, and what could we do to improve and enhance it?

The overall amount of money that the Scottish Government has is up by £713.4 million. The update says that “deployment of available resources” to—not within—portfolios is £502.3 million. I take it that that is additional funding, so where does that additional money come from? We are talking about half a billion pounds. I should really have asked you that before I went into the specifics of the portfolios, so I apologise if that adds a bit of confusion to the discussion.

Thank you. I am glad that you have got another life, because I have been stuck with this one for decades.

I think that the number 1 question that members of the committee want to ask when they get these figures is why specific changes have been made. We get the changes, but we do not really get the reasoning behind them. I also think that it would make life a lot easier for you if that was laid out. As you say, it is very difficult for a minister—not that I have been a minister—who comes to a committee such as this one, because you never know what we are going to ask. There is a mountain of different figures and it is not always easy to keep them all in your head. I think that that would make life easier for all concerned.

I will ask a couple more questions to close this part of the meeting, because we have not really touched on capital much in relation to borrowing. Paragraph 132 of the update says:

“all Reserve availability is being utilised to support the 2022-23 financial position.”

Paragraph 139 says:

“It is ... now highly probable that the full Capital borrowing annual allowance will not be utilised in 2022-23 as discussed in paragraph 125.”

Having jumped from paragraph 132 to paragraph 139, we go back to paragraph 125, which says:

“late underspends will be used in the first instance to reduce the current £450 million borrowing assumption in line with the Scottish Government’s Capital Borrowing policy”.

Where are those late underspends envisaged? What kind of funding are we talking about? How much are we talking about in those late underspends?

I recognise what you say about the fact that we might be talking about only 1 per cent of the overall size of the Scottish budget, but the changes within the actual portfolios are significant. For example, the funding changes to net zero have brought it down by £230.1 million, whereas we are talking about £1,110.4 million of additional funding for social justice, housing and local government. A huge proportion of funding is being moved within those portfolios. That is not 1 per cent—it is significantly higher than that. That alone is double the total figure.

If we look at it in a two-dimensional way—looking at the budget at the start of the financial year and at the end of the year—we can see that, yes, there might be a 1 per cent differential, but there are still those huge changes within the portfolios, which I find quite difficult to comprehend given that we had the autumn budget revision just a few months ago.