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In Grangemouth specifically. Grangemouth is part of my constituency.

Okay. Can you outline how your approach to the assigning of the Scottish Government moneys differs from how you understand that the UK Government will eventually—obviously, this has not happened yet—assign any of the £200 million?

That is what I thought, and I am glad to get that on the record.

We know that, in some of the industries that we are talking about, the amount of risk is heightened, particularly when they are involved in innovative work. To go back to an earlier question from the convener, do you have a different set point with regard to the risk that you are prepared to take with projects that involve higher innovation, or does the level of risk need to conform to the average risk profile across all your sectors?

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Arguably, my questions follow on from those of Kevin Stewart. I want to explore and to get a general understanding of—for my benefit and, I suspect, for that of businesses and some members of the public—how the triage process is working for the Grangemouth cluster post the closure of the refinery and the Scottish Government’s announcement about the provision of £25 million. We will also discuss the £200 million from the United Kingdom Government.

The reason I ask is that I have fairly regular meetings with a range of businesses that approach me. Sometimes they do so as a courtesy to indicate that they are interested, but sometimes they express to me that they are uncertain as to what the right criteria are. I would like to obtain an understanding of how that process is working. In your response, could you also explain your thinking on how you are developing an ecosystem and an infrastructure that will be sustainable for the future? That is a big question.

In some respects, you have made a similar point to the one that I would make. I totally understand what you have outlined—that is exactly what I had envisaged—but the fact that we cannot share such information is a challenge, because it means that companies that have made an application are uncertain. Even though they might present with a viable proposition that has the potential to get through the checkpoint by offering sustainability and delivering jobs at pace, which is obviously a consideration, a common theme that I hear is that although they might think that their proposition is a great idea, they are uncertain. I explain to them, “There’s a lot going on in the background—it’s a constant juggling act.”

Do you have issues with capacity, given the volume of interest? Is that part of the reason for the uncertainty that exists, as well as your having to be coy because of commercial sensitivity? How is your capacity?

Thank you.

I know that it was a massive question, but I personally am not hearing a great deal about the strategic thinking on the challenges and enablers of AI, for example, from Government, even in the face of the considerable uncertainty and complexity. I feel as though it is a juggernaut that is travelling very fast towards us and that we are tinkering round the edges.

We need to get ahead of the game in developing excellence in service provision, even with basic things such as getting small and medium-sized enterprises to actively develop agents to do some of the grunt work. It is about attitude and realising that we have only one choice, which is to seize the opportunity, because the alternative guarantees failure.

Hi, everybody. I have been listening to the session with interest. As the convener set out at the start, one of our key focuses is fiscal sustainability, but we have not really reflected on that thus far. We have touched on the UK balance sheet, which is pretty dismal—it drives everything and ultimately flows through into what we see in Scotland.

We have almost got a counterintuitive challenge here. First, we have touched on the availability of labour, which we know would be a key way of addressing some of those challenges, when we have political drivers against immigration. Secondly, I was surprised that Scottish Enterprise’s submission did not mention artificial intelligence, because it has so many links to skills and productivity, which we have touched on. Finally, I have a gentle challenge to Universities Scotland: you ended up in a position of overreliance on overseas students, but, from a business perspective, any business would be doing the risk analysis of having so many eggs in one basket—of a critical type of customer, if you like.

Are we ready and up for this challenge, given its counterintuitive nature and a backdrop of decreasing and constrained public sector funding against a demand from everybody for more money, often for a good reason, such as wanting to invest? Do we have the audacity of thinking and the leadership that we need? Do we properly understand the almost counterintuitive nature of fiscal sustainability? I appreciate that this is a pretty big question. We have had a nice chat so far. However, will that nice chat really start to shift the dial? That is my question. Elaine, you are nodding—

I know that it was a massive question, but I personally am not hearing a great deal about the strategic thinking on the challenges and enablers of AI, for example, from Government, even in the face of the considerable uncertainty and complexity. I feel as though it is a juggernaut that is travelling very fast towards us and that we are tinkering round the edges.

We need to get ahead of the game in developing excellence in service provision, even with basic things such as getting small and medium-sized enterprises to actively develop agents to do some of the grunt work. It is about attitude and realising that we have only one choice, which is to seize the opportunity, because the alternative guarantees failure.

I thank the witnesses for bearing with us. I will finish on one tiny point on the £36 million. You have extensively laboured the differential approach in how you deal with that in Social Security Scotland, but I did not get a strong sense of how your approach to overpayment through error—not somebody’s fault—differs from that to overpayment when there has been fraud as an intentional act of obtaining money by deception. Okay, you are going to be fair, you are going to be nice and you are going to treat people with dignity but, clearly, fraud is an entirely different matter. How do your processes differ in those circumstances?