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That is exactly the point that I raised with Ross Greer earlier. His answer was that, in other areas through bodies such as Scottish Enterprise, we can insist on fair work, fair wages, the living wage and so on. Why is there a difference here, when we seem to be able to do it in other areas?

I fear that we are getting into a budget debate, but if more money is to go to the colleges, would the member like to suggest where that money should come from? I would suggest higher taxes. Would he agree with that?

Can the member be more specific about where she thinks the problem is at the moment? Glasgow Kelvin College in my area has really taken a lead on this matter. That is one college that I have seen doing that kind of work. Does she think that some colleges and universities are not being so active?

An argument has been put forward by some of the universities—I am not saying that I agree with it, because I am sympathetic to what the member is trying to do—that this proposal strays into employment law. How would the member respond to that?

That brings me to another thing that I wanted to ask you about. How satisfied do you think that victims and families are with the public inquiries that have concluded? I get the impression—perhaps especially from inquiries down south, because it is bigger and there are more of them—that, at the end of an inquiry, we get the report and see the family standing outside the court, or wherever it happens to be, saying how dissatisfied they are with it all. In some cases, people are just looking for revenge or for heads to roll, and they will not be satisfied if they get anything less.

That takes me on to something else. Do inquiries always shine a light? We all lived through Covid not so long ago. I was on the COVID-19 Committee in Parliament for quite some time, and we had repeated statements from the First Minister and debates in Parliament, or at least questions, very regularly. It is all very well for a judge or whoever to look back and say, “Oh—you could have done something differently,” but, at the time, we were going through a big crisis that none of us had been through before. If we had put money aside to prepare for it, there would have been less money for the NHS. There is a cost to preparing for things. Is the Covid inquiry really adding anything material that we did not know?

We could probably go further on that, but I will leave it for now.

Let us go back to the costs of an inquiry. It has been suggested that inquiries should be inquisitorial rather than adversarial, and I wonder whether we have got the balance right. From some of the evidence that we have had, it seems that there are lawyers absolutely everywhere. There are lawyers for the victims, lawyers for the Government, lawyers for the health board and lawyers for the police—lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. I know that there has been some kind of mitigation—for example, at least two or three groups can have the same lawyers, which saves a little bit of money. However, I wonder whether the whole thing has become just too legally driven. You have been asked at length about having judges as chairs, and, in a sense, having a judge as a chair will encourage that situation, because that is what they are used to.

We have covered a bit of ground already, so I shall perhaps build on some of that.

Let us turn to the idea of having a fixed cost and a fixed timescale at the beginning of an inquiry, which is what seems to happen in other countries. I understand, Deputy First Minister, that you and I have a similar accountancy background. Audits are carried out by independent organisations—usually accountancy firms—or by Audit Scotland, and they have quite a tight timescale. Most people would say that audits are independent, whoever is carrying them out. Why is there such a fundamental difference in that we can audit complicated organisations such as banks within a few weeks, whereas the legal profession takes so long to carry out these inquiries?

Right—it is back to me. I accept that auditing a bank and investigating a death are different issues, but I wonder whether we could learn even a little bit from the former. Almost every other career, job or profession—whatever we want to call it—is time limited. Cleaners would like to spend longer cleaning things, but they have to do it within a certain time. Auditors use the concept of materiality. Yes, they might find that somebody has stolen £100 from the Royal Bank of Scotland, but, in the scheme of things, that is not material and they will put it aside when they come to their conclusion as to whether the financial statements give a true and fair view. We seem to be going to the other extreme with some of the public inquiries, which perhaps go into too much detail and lose sight of the bigger picture and what is material. Do you think that some lessons can be learned from other professions?

I suggested this to one of the judges and to other witnesses who appeared before the committee. Could we go for a model in which you say to the chair, “You’ve got two years and £10 million—do the very best you can within that”?