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On online solutions, can each council develop its own system for, say, parking permits, although that issue probably does not affect everyone here, and put it online? Is there some guidance from the centre? How does that work?

Is it a case of some of the health budget or justice budget coming to local government because you are spending it on early prevention?

Thank you, convener—it is good to see you back. It was good that you brought up the local governance review. As you pointed out, it is a local governance, not a local government, review. I often bring up the review in committee and ask the Government about it, but I do not seem to get any answers on where it is and when we will see some output from it.

What is your understanding of the local governance review, and when do you think that we will be able to see something coming from it? For me, that is public sector reform—it is what we should be focusing on right now.

I completely agree. We are talking about reform today, which is ideally to save costs, and a key element of that is early intervention and prevention. It seems to me that local government is at the heart of early intervention and prevention, but the problem that local government has is that, while you are saving money for the people, you do not actually get it back. For example, sports facilities will help to save money in the health budget later; libraries, economic development and education will help to tackle poverty; and working with communities will reduce the justice bill. If we are looking for reform, how does that money flow back into local government? That will help to reduce the overall Scottish budget. Even though it is not the local government budget, it is going to help.

Okay. That question might be for Sarah Watters as well. Will the review give us an idea of how funding should work between different organisations, or is it not going down to that sort of level?

This is my final question. How could data sharing make an impact and remove costs from the overall public purse?

Is that data shared between different organisations, such as between Welfare Scotland, local authorities and health boards? Do all those people have access to the same data?

Yes, there is cause for optimism, but the SFC also says that the figures

“should be interpreted with caution”.

I will move on to public sector reform. You mentioned that you are working on an overall picture of what the public sector landscape will look like. When do we expect to see that? I imagine that it will be key for setting the budget in years to come.

You mentioned public bodies working better together. Will they do that voluntarily, or do you think that that has to be mandated? The evidence that we have heard is that it is possible to get proper, big reform only when it is mandated centrally.