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You mentioned the length of stay, which is obviously key, in that you want to get people in and out as quickly as possible. Why is the length of stay so high in your board, and how will you change that?

Thank you.

I go back to earnings growth, for which the OBR figure is 2.0 per cent for the UK and your figure is 2.6 per cent for Scotland. You hinted that there might be some factors behind that divergence. Can you expand on that?

When we look at the OBR figures, we see that the average growth in earnings has been 2.7 per cent over the past 11 years. It has revised its forecast for earnings growth to 2 per cent. How cautious should the Scottish Government be with regard to that figure?

I will move on to my next question. You have been making estimates of the Government’s spending. What assumptions have you made about the public sector workforce? Have you seen that number falling or remaining constant?

David Page’s point that the whole point of reform is to reduce cost and duplication is key. The organisations around the table probably all have a human resources director, a finance director and an IT director, so the key question is: would you reduce your head count and voluntarily put people into a central pool or would that have to be mandated? I still do not know what the answer is, from listening to everyone today.

Do you see that as being a central pool of people that the Government would use to put out to bodies to see how they could change or reform their services?

We have heard about automation and data. One of the aims of the Scottish Government is to get the head count back to pre-Covid levels. Some of that will be through automation and better use of data and some of that will come from sharing services. From many of the submissions, we have seen that the head count is going in the wrong direction—it is going up. Do you have the resources required to make those changes in order to reduce the head count in the future?

No, but I think that Garry McEwan was about to come in.

Why do you think we do not do that now? Is it because there are too many political red lines that people will not go near? I am thinking of things like tuition fees, which you mentioned earlier.