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Again, we have to look at it in a broader context. The Scottish Parliament’s budget of around £140 million comes from the Government, so we are talking about a percentage of that number, in the context of a broader Scottish Government budget of £47 billion or £62 billion, depending on how you count it and whether you include all the non-cash and other items. Again, therefore, it is a very small percentage of the total budget.

I heard the SPCB’s evidence in relation to how it sees that. When a new commissioner is created, the SPCB will have a conversation with the Government as part of the budget process, in which it will say, “We’ve now got a new commissioner, so we need another £500,000 or £1 million to support that commissioner.” That will be part of the discussion with the Government about funding the Parliament. That funding should flow from the Government to Parliament and then on to the commissioner to support that. That would be the way in which that would normally work.

The point that I am making is that it is not the case that the Parliament will have to do less of other work because it has a commissioner that it needs to find space for. That money should flow through to it from the Government.

I am not able to speak for the Government on that. Obviously, the new First Minister will bring forward his programme for government. Of course, that has been delayed until September, because of the election period. I am not in a position to comment on that proposal.

That would be a question for the First Minister as part of the programme for government process.

That is absolutely possible. We are looking at that as part of the review. Clearly, every portfolio and every situation is different, but there is a series of questions to ask about whether, in order to improve efficiency, bodies are minimising their back-office costs through the shared estate strategy and the shared service programme for information technology, and addressing duplication between them and the Government. We are taking steps directly with public sector bodies to understand how we should go forward. In a scenario in which more than one public body is fulfilling a particular function, we will, of course, ask questions about why that is the case.

You and I have experience of seeing the situation that you describe in other large organisations in our earlier careers. It is fair to say that there is always a risk that people, wittingly or unwittingly, fall into seeking to make organisational change in order to create the illusion of progress. That is par for the course and is therefore always an issue that we need to be conscious of.

People, for good reasons, will think that they are doing the right thing by highlighting an issue that they think is important. One way in which they can do that, self-evidently, is to propose and create a commissioner. However, the next question must be whether that is the most effective way to deliver both for that group and across the broader system. That goes back to what I said earlier: keeping things simple is a very effective principle, and we want the organisational structure and the landscape of public sector bodies to be as simple as possible with as few moving parts as possible. That is how you get the most cost-effective solution and the most effective delivery, because people will not be falling over each other as they try to do their jobs, and it will be much clearer who is responsible for what and whether they have delivered.

I very much hope not, because of the needs of the broader public sector landscape. It is my role to ensure that we drive change and make things more efficient and effective, taking money from the back office and freeing it up for the front line, simplifying the landscape, making it clearer who is responsible for what and delivering better public services for the people of Scotland as a consequence.

The commissioner landscape is a small subset of that. As I said, it is not the Government’s role to interfere or to conduct a review of the commissioner landscape per se, but the Government can absolutely take a view on whether there should be new commissioners and how they would support the broader ecosystem.

The committees review and scrutinise the work of the commissioners and a range of other things, including, rightly, the work of Government. It is not up to Government to say how committees should scrutinise and carry out that work. If that SPCB-sponsored commissioner feels that the Parliament and its committees have not scrutinised his work effectively, that is a conversation to bring to the attention of the Parliament and the committees.

Yes.

As with everything else that happens in the legislative programme, if legislation creates a commissioner or some other piece of work that needs to happen, that is considered and scrutinised through the financial memorandum that is part of the parliamentary process, and then the whole Parliament takes a view on it. The Government clearly has a significant influence on that, depending on the issue. Then there is a budget process where the resource requirement in the relevant parts of the public sector landscape is assessed to understand what resources bodies will need to carry out the functions that are asked of them. That is an on-going process.