Seòmar agus comataidhean

You have quite naturally led me on to the next area that I wanted to explore. I noted that your submission says:

“Despite the rhetoric on wellbeing, there is work to be done to put the National Outcomes at the centre of decision making.”

In your experience, how are risk and uncertainty managed? I wonder whether the cross-cutting nature of the national performance framework makes the outcomes less certain. Where there is greater risk, that can often be an inhibitor. It is easier to make decisions about a tiny wee bit of something than it is to do so across the piece. How do risk and uncertainty impede effective decision making?

My question is for everyone, but Ben Thurman can go first.

Does Mark Taylor want to come in on that?

Before I bring in James Black, I have a quick question for you. How much evidence do you see of proper risk management in terms of disaggregation and risk probability outcomes and so on, from an academic perspective? Do you see that being done routinely? I have come across examples when speaking to ministers where there does not appear to be any awareness of how to disaggregate risk. I do not know whether that is something that you have seen.

Thank you.

I will ask just one more question, because a lot of information has been brought out and I know that my colleagues will want to pick up on it.

The focus of our inquiry is a just transmission for Grangemouth, and we have talked about some of the significant structural issues. To add to that, I ask each of you to give a view on how we can overcome another structural issue around financing, which concerns the role of women-led businesses, and incorporate up front the measures that Heather Buchanan outlined. The just transition is a massive area. To what extent are your representative organisations aware of the importance of women and women-led businesses being at the heart of it?

I declare an interest as an ambassador for the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking, with which I think Heather Buchanan now has a peripheral involvement.

Heather, you used a term that intrigued me when you talked about devising a glide path rather than a cliff edge. To me, that speaks to the current mismatch between the demand side and the supply side. I am interested in understanding the golden threads and the building blocks that are needed to be able to cut through. I know that Bankers for Net Zero has sent out a paper about something called Perseus, and you mentioned methodologies up front that are presumably meant and devised to be scalable. Equally, I think that NatWest and the ABI will be looking for those things, because they are the enabling structures.

Will you give us a little more flavour of what should ideally be in place to ensure that we have a glide path and not a cliff edge? Following on from that, what roles can the UK Government and particularly the Scottish Government play?

James, is the concept of scalable building blocks and underpinning measures something that you are looking at as well?

Ben, given your representatives’ wish for long-term patient capital, will you add your view on the concept of scalable commoditisation, if you like, of the market? Having heard what the two other panellists have said, how confident are you that we can really pull the golden threads together in the time in which we need to act, given the scale of the challenge?

So it is good that I asked the question.

I will finish off this bit. Derek, can you see the benefit of building in community benefit requirement mechanisms to square the circle in respect of some of these investments?