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Mr Flannigan, on Tuesday I asked you:

“Do you mean that, if the committee had signed off the original FM, we would potentially have been looking at a bill of £3.9 billion?”—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 23 January 2024; c 25.]

Your response was yes.

Why did you not have an expert advisory group on the development of this work?

There is an expert advisory group on ending conversion practices, an advisory group on the Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill, an advisory group on the age of criminal responsibility and an expert advisory group on heat pumps, but you did not think that an expert advisory group was required on this bill. Given what we have just described, could I suggest that perhaps it was?

I want to ask a little more about the core of the reform agenda. You have already touched on the problems of relationships in IJBs. We asked your officials about that earlier in the week. There is real dysfunction at the core of how money flows between the NHS and local authorities, and there is a lack of strategic ability to address that. How will the reforms that you have put in front of us address that core problem?

I will come back to oversight. What will that shared accountability do to deal with the core problem that two different sets of budgets go into one pot, that there are votes from the NHS and local authorities, and that they cannot decide strategically about what needs to be invested in?

I will come back to the national scrutiny issue shortly. We still do not know what the changes will look like at local level or how the relationships will change. You have already said this morning that you have identified problems in those relationships, but you cannot tell us how voting rights and so on will shift at local level.

On the national care board, you have already mentioned oversight issues. Under current ministerial powers, ministers already have the power to intervene when they see substandard care issues, do they not?

You and I probably agree on that. What I am asking is why civil servants cannot help you, as the minister, to do that right now, rather than a national care board having to deliver it at the cost of £30 million a year. It is my understanding that you have 170 civil servants working on the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. Is that correct?

That is at a cost to the taxpayer of £1 million a month. Is that correct?

Over the past couple of years, we have still had ministers in front of this and other committees defending the proposals in the original bill and suggesting that they should be backed by the Parliament. When did it become apparent to you that the country did not have the money to pay for the legislation that you introduced to the Parliament?