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One issue is widening the tax base to ensure that the Scottish Government has more resources. That is important whatever we do.

I want to talk about a successful Scottish Government initiative, which is the data-driven innovation initiative. That was signed in 2018 as part of the Edinburgh and south-east Scotland city deal, and it is delivered by the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, which I visited last week. It set a goal of supporting more than 400 entrepreneurs to raise £50 million within 10 years, and that has been resoundingly successful. In six years—not 10—it has managed to lever in more than £200 million of investment, rather than the £50 million target. Instead of 400, it has 500 cutting-edge companies that are raising funds to boost work that drives innovation.

However, I feel that the Scottish Government is not investing enough in such initiatives. For example, Universities Scotland gave evidence to us that, relative to the rest of the UK, investment spend has fallen by 16.2 per cent to 13 per cent in recent years. It said, and has given us the research sources that prove, that for every £1 that we invest in that area, 12.7 times that is put back into the Scottish economy. It said:

“If Scotland can recover its competitive position back to a 15.4% share of UKRI funds”,

which we had a few years ago,

“this would deliver an additional economic impact of at least £640 million to Scotland’s economy.”

Should we not be spending more than a minuscule proportion of Scottish resources in areas where Scotland is globally competitive—including, in your neck of the woods, the University of Dundee with its life sciences, and Heriot-Watt University with its robotics and research into marine and space and a myriad of other areas—so that we can have a prosperous, highly skilled workforce of the future?

We are really struggling for time, to be honest, given that other members have still to come in, and we have another session to come.

It will be lost twice next year because it is an on-going £160 million every year. It will be £320 million next year.

Okay, but economic growth is obviously important if we are going to provide the resources to do all that the Parliament wishes to do and, indeed, the Government wishes to do. There are concerns regarding the omission of explicit references to economic growth. For example, that led Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, which responded to the consultation, to say that it feels as if the Government has “downgraded” economic growth, which is exactly the opposite of the message that we want to convey, given that it is one of the four priorities, as you have already touched on.

You also touched on the UN sustainable development goals. Goal 1 is “No poverty”. It was unclear whether the national outcome seeks to reduce poverty because, in Scotland’s NPF, the national outcomes are more realistic about what will be achieved within a devolved setting. Is that the case?

One of the UN’s sustainable development goals is that there should be no poverty, whereas the Scottish Government’s aim is to reduce poverty. Is that because we cannot eliminate poverty within a devolved setting? Is that the reason for it, or is there another reason why the Scottish Government does not have the same goal as the UN?

Thank you. I will open up the session to colleagues round the table.

I think that Keith McDonald wants to come in. [Interruption.]

I do not think that anyone doubts that having more money in people’s pockets is a good way of reducing poverty. However, local government and others are saying that, if the money went into their services, they would be able to provide more jobs, apart from anything else, which is the best way out of poverty.

Professor Heald said that

“being ‘progressive’ on social security and other cash benefits at the expense of public services expenditure will have an ‘anti-progressive’ effect because lower income groups have less access to substitute private services if satisfactory public services are not available.”

My concern is that local government is having to focus on its statutory obligations and, therefore, cannot support things such as employability services in the way that it wishes.

People are trapped on benefits—they might have more benefits now than they would otherwise have, but they are still trapped. We want to break that cycle of poverty. You know yourself, cabinet secretary, that the situation in Dundee is a particularly difficult one.

Indeed—and so is the curriculum and how it is taught, and there is a whole debate to be had on that separately.

I can understand the Government’s position on flexibility, because everyone calls for flexibility. When we had the historic concordat between the Scottish Government and COSLA in 2007, local government often did things that the Government was not happy about, and the Government was getting blamed for decisions that were being taken at local authority level by other political parties that were running those local authorities.