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Is there a risk with all the different documents that come before us, including your reports—when I was on the Public Audit Committee, I could sense your frustration when you came back time and again on the health service or major capital projects and identified the same weaknesses in the system—that we simply cannot see the wood for the trees, because there is so much verbiage, and that a simpler approach to how we set, monitor, report back on and audit goals would be more useful for this committee, Parliament and the public at large?

No, I wanted to come in on public sector pay.

On that 9 per cent target, you will be well aware from ministers that the Scottish Government has a fixed budget and that, therefore, its capacity to borrow or to fund public sector pay effectively comes out of other public services.

Over the years, as we have considered the Scottish budget, the finance secretary has said that she did not want to set out a public sector pay policy because that would become the floor through which public sector pay negotiations are conducted. What is the mood among your members on public sector pay specifically, given that we now have a 9 per cent policy over the next three years? That could be subject to change but that is the policy now. Is there an awareness that there will be cuts to front-line services if your members, particularly public sector unions, continue to press for pay settlements that are above that 9 per cent, which is what we are tracking towards at the moment?

I have two questions on a quite different subject. I asked the Audit Scotland witness earlier whether they had a better definition of preventative spending and whether we could get a categorisation that could be baked into a budget and therefore become ring fenced. Is there any international best practice around that that you and the Government could learn from? It strikes me that preventative spending is still quite nebulous.

My question for David Livey concerns the financial pressures that many voluntary organisations are feeling. When I used to be a councillor I often had to look closely at funding applications. I would notice how difficult such organisations found it to pay their staff and keep the lights on in their premises, as Ms Smith mentioned earlier. Are such pressures making those issues worse? When I used to look at those applications, I would notice a pay gap, in that people working for voluntary sector organisations—which, in many senses, fulfil what should be the role of public services—seemed to be paid significantly less than they would be had they been working for local authorities, for example. Are those pay gaps extending and widening?

To go back to the point about preventative spending, if the voluntary sector cannot fulfil the vital services that they provide, the responsibility for doing so will roll back on the state, at, I assume, considerably higher cost. Are you noticing any deterioration in pay and conditions in the sector? How aware are central and local government bodies that if we lose those voluntary organisations the upstream costs down the line will be much more significant?

I think that both of those lead to stagnation, poor decision making and ultimately a downfall. I suspect that interfacing with politicians in the next 12 months might be quite interesting in that respect. Particularly in relation to public finances and long-term projections, what impact will hubris and complacency have? How can the Fiscal Commission work with us to make sure that the Government displays neither?

One of the other areas that you identify, and the Scottish Government identified, as potentially helping to save its bacon, is the pivot towards preventative spend. When I have listened to ministers discussing that, I have struggled with the definition of what is preventative spend and what is spending on problems that have a significant acuity. To take the example of the prescription of Mounjaro on the NHS, you could say that that is dealing with a problem of obesity that could have been dealt with earlier, but equally you could argue that it is preventative spending because it stops the acuity in the health issues that could arise out of somebody remaining clinically obese for a significant period. Do you get the sense that the Government has a clear-cut definition of what is preventative spend? If it does not have that, how will it be able to proceed towards the stated objective?

It goes further than the health service. For example, if you cut an employability scheme, you are dealing with unemployment or skills gaps later. Does the Scottish Government need to do more work to classify it right across the board? Otherwise, it strikes me that it is problem solving all the time rather than preventing problems from developing. Is that just the nature of the short-term stop-go budget gap?

You mentioned earlier the misalignment between different strategies and workstreams that the Government is undertaking, but you note in your submission that the medium-term financial strategy does not refer to the national performance framework at all—there is no misalignment; there is just no attempt to align the two. The convener, Mr Marra and I spoke with the Scottish Government last week about its review of the national performance framework. I took from that meeting that, at best, there will be some tinkering with it but not a fundamental remodelling or reworking of what it does or what it is intended to do. You go on to mention that no performance data has been reported against 11 of the 81 current national performance indicators.

If we are to press ahead with something like the national performance framework and if it is to be useful, what would you like to see coming out of that? If it is to be a benchmarking exercise, presumably it is just an internal monitoring thing and it should rest with the national statistician. If it is to be a toolkit, arguably an organisation such as Audit Scotland could have some interface with or ownership of it to a certain extent. What impression do you have of where the Government is going on this? If it is to be useful and valuable, and therefore we should commit further taxpayers’ money to it, what would you like to see emerging at the end of this process?

Can you think of an example of where you personally drew a minister’s or a Government’s attention to risks in clear and vivid terms? How responsive do they tend to be to that? Generally, they are smart people who are advised by smart people and sometimes they might be prepared to take those risks.

Lastly, you have made a virtue of the fact that Scottish National Party policy is to have a larger public sector than the rest of the UK and for that sector to be paid better than it is in England. Would you be willing to look at that pay differential between Scotland and the rest of the UK and shrink it, rather than shrinking the amount of money that you are spending on public services, which is the logical outcome unless you tackle public sector pay?