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I turn to financial management and stewardship. Paragraph 15, which is on page 5, says:

“NHS Highland delivered a break-even position ... while operating in a period of considerable uncertainty and while responding to the ... operational and financial challenges”

that the Covid-19 pandemic has posed for service delivery. Given those circumstances and the backdrop, how much of an achievement by NHS Highland do you consider that position to be?

The report explains that the board delivered total efficiency savings of £20.7 million in 2020-21, of which £5.4 million, which is 26 per cent, were recurring savings. Does that mean that 74 per cent—nearly three quarters—of the total savings can be counted as non-recurring?

Joanne Brown might be able to answer this, or perhaps you may be able to flesh it out. How were the non-recurring savings made? Do you have any insight into how the board plans to move forward in making planned savings in future financial years?

That is similar to the position in many local authorities in many respects.

I will hand back to Richard Leonard.

It was encouraging and reassuring to read that performance appraisals have been introduced across the organisation. What proportion of the workforce has received a performance appraisal? Have you had any opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the process?

[Inaudible.] I do not want to rehearse the discussion that we have just had with the Deputy First Minister, but I agree with Graham Simpson and Paul Sweeney that the instruments, and the regulations that they bring into effect, would have benefited from scrutiny so that some of the negative unintended consequences would not have occurred.

The justification for bringing in the regulations through the made affirmative route is that, in some cases, the regulations had to be implemented the very next day. However, again, we did not have the justification from the Government for why it had to be the next day and not the next week or 10 days later. On that basis, and given that Parliament was sitting when the regulations were first laid, I support the suggestion from Graham Simpson, and perhaps Paul Sweeney, that the affirmative route would have been the better one to use in the circumstances.

Could it not be argued that your somewhat intemperate and bad-tempered response to legitimate questions proves my point that you are not overly happy with parliamentary scrutiny at the moment?

Good morning, Deputy First Minister. I welcome you and your officials.

If we can step back from the pandemic for a moment and think in slightly more abstract terms, do you think that the increased use of skeleton legislation and the widespread and now relatively common use of delegated powers within that is consistent with the need for parliamentary scrutiny and accountability?

Would you concede that it is unhealthy to go down the route of having very broad-brush legislation that, in effect, allows ministers to flesh out that law in regulation, free from the constraints of parliamentary scrutiny?