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I go back to my original question: knowing what you know now, what would you do differently next time? I am entirely sympathetic with regard to the complexity and nature of this type of work, but I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that this has just not landed at the right level for this finance committee. If we set aside the ambition of changing social care, I do not think that you could conceive of the committee emerging with confidence in the estimates and the articulation of the unknown unknowns, particularly after the first of our scrutiny sessions on the financial memorandum. I am trying to establish just what you would do differently next time, having acknowledged all of that. Can you give us some reflections on that?

That question is for Ms Bennett in particular but, if that is unfair, I direct it to the minister.

On engaging with stakeholders, I would go back to the convener’s point about your period of engagement with key people on understanding the basis of your estimates and the need to do that without prejudicing future decision making. I do not think that that has come through, either.

Something that you have said about the cost of data collection intrigued me. In this committee, I often go back to my old life, when I was engaged in large transformational change programmes. I am surprised to note that we do not have what would, in effect, be a kind of unit cost per service by local authority. Can you give me some flavour of that? Have I misunderstood the situation?

You have made a very important point. We want to support this measure with regard to confidence but, to do that, we have to compare apples with apples. Equally, if concerns are being expressed about a loss of economies of scale and so on, the question is how we can know whether that is true if we cannot compare that data. I agree that it is an important area, and it likely feeds into the wider picture. I acknowledge that you have agreed to come back to us on that, and the committee is keen to see that information.

Finally, at the end of all of this—in, say, five years—and regardless whether we have descoped elements or whether the scope has increased, there will still have been great uncertainty over inflation and the financial environment. Given that uncertainty, how will we be able to compare the actions that are ultimately taken with the estimates? It strikes me, having heard what you have outlined with regard to the data, that that will be a major challenge. That will be the ultimate test of the processes that we are going through, given that we fully accept the uncertainty, because of the scale of the project.

You can see why the additional level of data, including the rationale for the exclusions and so on, is so important.

Many of the areas that I wanted to probe have been covered by my colleagues. Mark Taylor, I quickly scanned through the Audit Scotland publication, “Radical Action needed on data”, which came out this morning. We are taking a top-down approach by looking at the financial memorandum of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill, but I will look at it from the other side, where we know that we have issues around data. Are there any more general areas that pertain to our inquiry that you would like to pull out in the light of that paper?

In relation to that paper, I assume that you made that call because, as you have described it, the appetite for data as a mechanism of driving change in Government is variable. Is that due to constraints, or lack of resources or understanding of how important data is as enabler? What is your sense of that?

You make clear your concerns about unmet need in your written submission.

I will finish off on some of the themes that everybody has raised. We all agree that this is a framework or enabling bill, and that it involves a huge and highly complex transformational project, with huge uncertainty in all the variables. In addition, there is the approach of using secondary legislation, which has been raised.

Knowing what we now know, and setting aside parliamentary processes—we probably want to discuss those separately—does any of you want to bring out any final things that should have been in the financial memorandum, even if that was with an amber alert stating, “We suspect this, but we cannot know, for the extremely good reasons that we have set out.” Have we captured everything thus far, either in your submissions or in the questioning?

Are there any last comments from Ralph Roberts or Hannah Tweed?

I sense that you want to come in, Hannah.

Ralph, do you have any final comments on that?