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All those areas—regeneration funding, university funding and college funding—are vital for skills and regeneration, and for growth. The committee has heard an awful lot of evidence about how important it is that we get growth, and you have said that the budget is about growth. How do you react to the evidence that the committee heard from the Fraser of Allander Institute representative on 9 January, who said:

“I would not say that the budget is particularly focused on growth”?

On the same day, David Bell said:

“it does not look like the budget particularly favours economic growth.”—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 9 January 2024; c 9, 10.]

Growth is meant to be one of the key missions. I have given a variety of examples where you are not meeting your own targets or what you intend to do, and people do not believe that you are meeting them.

We had evidence from the Scottish Fiscal Commission on the lack of a public pay policy being provided to it under the protocol to which the Government and the SFC are signatories. You and I have exchanged letters on that issue. Perhaps you could set out to the committee why the Government failed, despite extensions to deadlines, to provide that public pay policy to the SFC, as has been set out in the evidence that we received.

That is in your equality statement, which was published with the budget. You have said—under your name—that there is a significant risk to learners from poorer backgrounds as a result of the cut that you have made. What is that significant risk, as you understand it?

Non-research-intensive universities are more reliant on the teaching grant than research-intensive universities are, so the modern universities are more reliant on the money that you are cutting. You cannot tell us today, however, how the cut will be distributed across those universities.

The position has been described to me not as “normal” or “usual”, Dr Cumming, but as “a shambles”. Far less information is available to the college sector this year than in previous years. As you will understand, budgets are set, courses are advertised and people apply. Those applications are coming in, but colleges do not know whether they can run the courses, because they do not know what their budget is.

College leaders have also said to me that the current situation is “soul-destroying” and that they are “staring into the abyss”—that there is no direction, no leadership, no clarity, no empathy, no solutions and no clue. Deputy First Minister, what would you say to college leaders who tell MSPs that that is the situation?

There were some reports at the weekend from the Deputy First Minister about the funding that was allocated to the Clyde Gateway regeneration project, which appears to have been a typographical error in the budget. Are there any more errors in the budget that you would like to bring to the committee’s and Parliament’s attention at the moment, or is that an isolated error?

Do you want to bring any more to our attention?

I will briefly return to the office-holders. We have had some conversations ahead of an inquiry that we are about to undertake about the capacity of the corporate body to scrutinise them. You have said that significant challenge has been made to the office-holders in the budget process and the bids that they have put in, but does it stretch the capacity of the corporate body to do that work?

I am reasonably satisfied with those answers and the detail that you have all given today regarding the commissioners and office-holders. It feels to me that adding a further four commissioners to that workload has made it untenable, but I know that we will hear much more on that in our inquiry.

Can you tell the committee what the budget for further education will be?