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I will let colleagues come in, but I am really enjoying our discourse. The Scottish child abuse inquiry has cost more than £100 million and has been on-going for 11 years, but the inquiry team has produced interim reports so that people can see what is happening in the inquiry. It is not one of those inquiries that seem to be sealed off and from which you then get a big splurge at the end. Should that mechanism be routinely introduced to inquiries, so that victims of an injustice can see that progress is being made?

Mr Henderson, you said that the proposed levy

“aligns with several principles of good tax policy”

but that the

“levy’s proportionality could be challenged if costs are passed onto leaseholders through increased purchase prices for new homes, undermining affordability objectives.”

The difficulty is that you are obviously concerned about putting up prices and, at the same time, we need the money to carry out the work.

When I was a councillor in Glasgow in the 1990s, one of my churches wanted to convert the church into eight flats. The difficulty was that the cost of meeting the standards 30 years ago was so prohibitive that it would not have worked financially. That meant that the church had to close, because it could not be converted to anything valuable.

I understand that it is a difficult balance to strike, because we could lose a building altogether because of the costs of trying to meet all the regulations, and they are already high, so if we were to add a levy on top, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. However, is there any evidence that this would make a decisive difference, on top of all the other costs that one would have to meet when converting an old building?

Interestingly, Professor Cameron, who was involved in the Jersey child abuse inquiry, was the first witness in this inquiry of ours. He said that the public inquiries team should do what the Jersey inquiry team did, which is to revisit the situation a year or two after the inquiry’s conclusion to see what had been done on the ground.

I want to ask you about the threat of a public inquiry. If, for example, the NHS or Police Scotland—or whoever might become subject to an inquiry—finds out that there has been a miscarriage of justice or an alleged miscarriage of justice, they would not just sit there staring into the headlights, waiting for the public inquiry to run them over. They will look at their systems as soon as they find out and say, “What did we do wrong? What can we change? What can we improve?” They might find that people need disciplinary action to be taken against them. Do you think that the threat of an inquiry has the impact of changing the activities of organisations?

That concludes questions from the committee. Do the witnesses have any final points to make? Are there any issues that they feel we did not cover in our questioning this morning?

No one is casting any aspersions on you or on Thompsons, but there is a strong case whereby legal costs seem excessive—certainly to laypeople. For example, Police Scotland’s direct costs in supporting the Sheku Bayoh public inquiry—I understand that you were not involved in it—are £25,409,629, of which £18,087,494 is directly attributable to legal costs. So far, the cost of that inquiry, which has run for six years, is £51 million. The Scottish Police Federation has said that the police contribution to that is equivalent to employing 500 police officers for a year.

Although justice for the alleged victims in any public inquiry is important, the opportunity cost is something that we, as representatives of the Scottish Parliament, have to consider. Is that public inquiry more viable than, for example, another 500 police officers on the streets—or whatever else? We are not saying that we should throw the baby out with the bath water and that there should be no public inquiries. The committee is not saying that that public inquiry should not have happened or that another one should have. We are asking how we can deliver the same level of justice or, indeed, better justice more efficiently and effectively and at lower cost to the public purse.

We have seen in the evidence that some inquiries go on for some time—I just mentioned the Sheku Bayoh inquiry, which has gone on for six years. They go on for years and there is a law of diminishing returns—in terms of public interest, apart from anything else. Public interest goes down, the reason for holding the inquiry becomes more obscure and the cost goes up.

In weeks to come, we will be looking at systems in other countries but, given your wide experience, I would like to hear your views on the level of justice that you are seeking. I am aware of the points that you have made about, for example, the inquiries into infected blood—you believe that one was inadequate, while the other was done more thoroughly and produced a better outcome. With the system that we have, how can we become more efficient and effective in delivering what everyone wants—that is, better outcomes?

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I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests.

The next item on our agenda is an evidence session on the Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill. I welcome to the meeting Jonathan Henderson, assistant chief officer and director of prevention at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and Peter Drummond, trustee of the Scottish Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and chair of its practice committee. We have around 90 minutes for this evidence session.

I thank you both for your written submissions. I would like to ask Mr Drummond about his submission. The content was excellent, but the size of the typing was a wee bit small for my liking—I had to get the magnifying glass out. In it, you said:

“Whilst Scotland’s more robust regulatory framework has helped limit the extent to which we are affected, there nonetheless exist a significant number of cases where householders find themselves facing very significant remediation costs through no fault of their own.”

Can you give us some examples of that?

The only reason that I am asking you about that is because it is in your submission.

It would not derail an inquiry as such. Our inquiry is not about whether an inquiry should or should not take place, but about how to make inquiries more efficient and effective in delivering justice and value for the taxpayer at the same time.