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The reconciliation of the money happens either this year or next year. There is no gain—it is just a question of in which year the money is reconciled.

I go back to the point that I made earlier about us having a bit of self-regulation. I am going to write to the committee with the detail of our assumptions on that. However, we have internal rules about what our assumptions are, and we have the £3 billion limit. Fiscal framework adjustments have been helpful for inflation proofing those elements of the framework. However, we want to ensure that anything that we do in relation to capital debt is deemed to be prudent and affordable.

I think that it was assumed that there was an alignment with the objectives. It is not that the programme for government was saying that everything that had gone before was not important; instead, it was elevating things of absolutely critical importance and saying that they would come first and foremost in the budget discussion.

No. I look forward to further engagement with the committee on the budget as we go forward.

I do not accept that. However, I accept that we have, in essence, been trying to make a budget work through a set of absolutely chaotic UK Government decisions, although those decisions have now become less chaotic. Looking to 2025-26 and beyond, that is extremely helpful.

However, trying to set a budget, pay policy or anything else with absolutely no idea of the funding that you will get is really difficult. This might sound basic, but our having an idea earlier in the year what the budget will be and what funding we can expect to receive from the UK Government would be transformational.

I will mention one point before it goes out of my head. Anyone who is involved in negotiations understands their complexity, and the importance of not driving pay inflation and of recognising that it is not just about pay but about making efficiencies, as part of the settlement. For example, in rail, part of the pay deal was linked to making efficiencies.

I would not cut the health budget in order to have contingency in case the pay increase goes up to 5 per cent. Instead, we would look at anything that was above the parameters that we have set to be paid for through efficiency gains and productivity gains. We have to be careful about what we say in pay policy, otherwise it drives scenarios that are not helpful for the public purse. I do not want to cut budgets while we are in the process of negotiating, because that just drives wage inflation. We have to be careful about what we are setting out and what our expectations are.

I will, of course—I do—look carefully at comments from the Fraser of Allander Institute, the SFC and others. However, I re-emphasise how complex pay is and how important it is for us to be very careful about how we land pay policy.

A number of capital projects are on-going. What we are talking about is having a line of sight and certainty for those that have yet to begin. We could just say what we think we can do, but the fact is that a lot of money can be expended in the early days of a project in preparing business cases and so on. Therefore, I would prefer to wait until spring, which is not far off.

My expectation with regard to the Treasury is that we will not have to wait until some day in spring until we get all the information. The flow of information has become much better and we will—I hope—get indications of the direction of travel, which will ensure that, come spring, I can publish, as intended, the infrastructure investment pipeline alongside the medium-term financial strategy. It will use that longer horizon. I hope that that will give certainty and allow a larger number of projects to be taken forward.

At the moment, we are still facing the cut in capital funding. If I were to take what was in the infrastructure investment pipeline and apply that cut in capital, a number of projects would be unable to proceed.

My officials will get that note for you in a second. I have attended all but one or two of those meetings, which have been productive, with quite a wide range of views in the room, as you would imagine.

In addition to the tax strategy group, I have also had meetings with key stakeholders in advance of the publication of the tax strategy to take a wider range of views on what that strategy should do and what it should help us to achieve, and to test the draft objectives.

I am looking at my officials to see whether we have that note.

The group has met three times this year and there has been additional work between meetings to get us to our current advanced point, so I have been able to go out to the wider group of stakeholders with that product.

It has met three times this year.

The tax strategy seeks to do a number of things. It is about providing certainty for taxpayers and raising awareness of our system. That issue was raised quite strongly in the wider forum. Stakeholders were concerned about the lack of awareness of the UK and Scottish tax systems, so we must look at ways of sharing information and raising awareness.

Without a doubt, there is a balance to be struck in how we tackle poverty. The child poverty plan has a number of pillars. One is about direct support to families, which encompasses some of the areas that you talked about, such as the Scottish child payment. However, the plan also talks about services, including those that help to move and support people out of poverty.

Employability services are one of those areas. For example, there have been positive trends in the number of parents who access support. Since the publication of “Best Start, Bright Futures: Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2022-2026” back in 2022, the proportion of parents who access no one left behind support has increased from 26 per cent to about 48 per cent. Services such as supporting parents into employment are absolutely critical.

However, the pillars of tackling poverty have to do everything. Putting money into families’ pockets is important. In our ambitions to meet our statutory child poverty interim targets, the approach that is taken by the plan has three prongs: support to people directly; services that wrap around, such as childcare; and employability, because work is one of the main ways out of poverty. In my view, it is not either/or. As the child poverty plan recognises, we have to make sure that supports are provided in all those ways.

In my constituency experience, I am told time and again by families who face real hardship that having money in their pockets literally puts food on the table. I therefore push back against any idea that we should somehow diminish our support such as the Scottish child payment in particular.

To anticipate your next remark, we need to make sure that the other services that support families are also sustained. That means difficult choices, potentially, in other areas.