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Finally, I will ask about another area of spend. You and I had discussions some time ago about the funding of campus police officers through PEF. That is an example of a wider challenge that you have touched on a few times during the meeting, which is that schools are providing all sorts of other services because public services have been stripped away. When it comes to annual budget setting or on-going intragovernmental discussions throughout the year, how do you manage the funding of services that a school might wish to provide?

I have a different view on the value of campus police officers but, at the moment, that service is being funded by the education budget. Would it be better funded by Police Scotland, the NHS or Social Security Scotland? Are there discussions between cabinet secretaries about the most effective way of funding it, which budget should allocate the money and how the spend can be tracked so that we can identify what the money is being spent on? Historically, that has been a challenge in our scrutiny of attainment challenge funding.

Thank you, cabinet secretary. I would love to pursue that, but I am conscious of time and the fact that I should have been at a meeting with the Presiding Officer five minutes ago. I will slip away in a minute, if that is okay, convener.

Nico McKenzie-Juetten mentioned a moment ago, and you have just repeated it, cabinet secretary, that this is a routine process and the alternative would be a truncated process. You do not have cross-Government responsibility for board appointments, but are you aware of any situations in which the truncated process has been followed? If this is the norm and we are just following the regular process, are you aware of any examples where that has not been done and the truncated process has had to be followed?

Excellent. That is good to hear.

I am also interested in attendance, which Miles Briggs raised. I am aware that the Children’s Commissioner for England has done a lot of positive work on attendance. Is there anything that we can learn from that? The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland has had other areas of focus recently, quite legitimately, but some really good work on the subject appears to have taken place in England. I wonder what we could draw from that, given that it is an acute issue but also very much a shared issue, and not just in Scotland and England—it is a wider western problem.

My question is more about how money is spent across Government, rather than the specific debate that you and I have had before about the value of campus cops. Whether SAC funding needs to be used for that purpose is a legitimate question because, putting aside my views on campus cops, could Police Scotland’s budget not be used to directly fund them, given that police officers are being funded?

We have had the landfill tax for a while now, as have Wales and England. Why has the Scottish Government not looked into the potential for a differential rate before this point?

I would certainly welcome that additional work happening. It seems that the single deciding factor in setting the rate in Scotland is the rate in England. However, we have our own climate targets and waste reduction targets. What regard has been given to the impact that setting the landfill tax rate at an equivalent level to the English rate would have on the targets that we have set in Scotland?

On all those targets—climate emissions, waste reduction, circular economy and so on—our targets are either more ambitious than England’s or we have targets in areas that they simply do not have. It seems that there is a dichotomy, because the tax is one of the key drivers for meeting those targets. The rate that we have set it at does not seem to be based on what we would need to do to hit those targets; it seems to be based entirely on the rate that the UK Government has set in England.

I understand the delivery mechanism, but if we are trying to get an accurate understanding of how much it costs at present per individual, for example, surely it would be crucial to take into account the associated social work costs. I understand that there is a bit of a data-availability issue, because a lot of that data does not go through the drug and alcohol information system—DAISy—but I presume that councils would, to some extent, be able to provide information via freedom of information requests. Social work is quite a substantial additional area of cost that is not reflected in the financial memorandum, which would make it quite hard to get an understanding of the likely cost per individual.

That would be useful.

I appreciate that. However, there is potential for the costs to increase, because we would all hope that, even just through the publicity around the bill, more people would come forward to have an existing addiction diagnosed, and thereby access support. As things stand, do you have any data on associated social work costs from local authorities?