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I think that the evidence was from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and other organisations. In the discussions that ministers had with those child poverty organisations, they kept coming back to the point that mitigating the two-child cap was the main thing that could be done. Since then, further evidence has been provided—by, I think, the Fraser of Allander Institute—that we might, in fact, have underestimated the number of children who would be lifted out of poverty through the work on the two-child cap.

I commit to our doing so, and I am sure that the Minister for Parliamentary Business will assist us in that process.

I am sure.

Before this goes out of my head, an opportunity exists with digital and artificial intelligence that can transform the way in which services are delivered. In 10 years, things will probably be unrecognisable from how they are now. The question is, what do we do with the workforce whose roles have perhaps been made redundant? One of the opportunities that the public sector needs to consider is upskilling that workforce for other roles that are still required. That might not be the full story, but it is one opportunity. There are good examples of that having happened.

There are also good examples of cost avoidance. I think that it was the National Records of Scotland—no, it was the Scottish Public Pensions Agency—that used digital to avoid recruitment. It assumed that we would have to recruit a large contingent workforce at huge cost in order to do a fix on pension payments; instead of doing that, it found a digital solution. That is exactly what we need to look at. Recruitment should not be a default in order to fix a problem or deal with the build of something.

I think that that is achievable, but not without a cost, because that money could otherwise have gone to pay negotiations or front-line services. Whether it is recruiting more people or doing things differently on the front line, everything has a cost, and that has to be acknowledged first and foremost.

At stage 1 of the budget, we had a choice. Instead of putting money out to portfolios, I could have held it back. However, it is the same money, so, regardless of whether I had held it back or it had gone out to portfolios, there was not a magic bit of money. I decided to give it to portfolios to give them some resilience in the knowledge that we might end up in a place that was far from optimal with regard to employer national insurance contributions. It will not be easy, but, with support from my officials, working with Richard McCallum and his team, portfolios will be supported to manage supporting the cost of 40 per cent of ENICs liabilities.

It will be for local government to manage that, and the 32 local authorities will have their own responses as they set their budgets over the coming weeks.

Significant savings of, I think, about £200 million, have already been made through public service reform, and the plan is to save another £380 million. Therefore, there are figures associated with what can be saved, but, going further, the work that Ivan McKee is taking forward with every part of the public sector will generate a plan for each area. To be blunt, the way that things are done in, for example, the health service with regard to front-line emergency services or in the police will not be the same as the way that things are done in less front-facing organisations. It would be a very blunt tool if I were to say that all organisations had to meet a certain percentage of savings, given that the health service needs to ensure that we have more appointments and procedures for patients. Other organisations have opportunities to share services and back-office functions. An across-the-board percentage would be too blunt a tool, but I want to give an absolute assurance that every organisation will have a plan for reduction and how it will do that.

We must be cognisant that front-line services will be prioritised in terms of their ability to deliver, and some of those services will potentially still need to grow. Some of the delivery of additional appointments and procedures will be done through existing staff working additional hours, but the NHS might need to recruit further staff to deliver that.

Applications for the fund—I think that the deadline is the first week of March—will have to set out those savings, so we will know that once the applications have been scrutinised. They will not all be approved. If they do not cut the mustard in terms of what is going to be delivered, they will not be supported. Which applications will be supported is a work in progress, but, once we know which projects will be supported, we will be able to answer the question what the fund will deliver. We cannot answer that at the moment, because we are—

There is no scorecard that I can provide that shows that, if we put money into X, the outcome will be Y. The decision was based on the evidence that was provided to us by others who had done some work on which of the levers that we could pull would have the biggest impact. That evidence was provided to us and we took the decision on the basis of the discussions that we had at that point.

We can provide the committee with the evidence that we got from those organisations in our discussions with them on the work that they had undertaken on the impact of mitigating the two-child cap, but I do not have a scorecard that says that, if we do X, the outcome will be Y. No such scorecard exists. However, the evidence that we garnered from other organisations in our discussions about what more we could do to alleviate child poverty brought us to this point, and that proposition is in the budget as the one that we believe will make the biggest impact on child poverty.

We want to give stability to taxpayers, and so we feel that we have probably gone as far as we should go. We have asked those with the broadest shoulders to pay a bit more, which has helped us with, for example, tackling child poverty. Scotland is the only part of the UK where child poverty rates are falling. That does not happen accidentally; it comes from investment in tackling child poverty, and that investment has come from those with the broadest shoulders paying a bit more, although the majority of Scottish taxpayers will still pay less.

You are right that thresholds will be frozen, but that is the case in the rest of the UK as well. If I remember rightly, the previous UK Government set a policy to freeze the thresholds until 2028, and the current Labour UK Government has continued with that. We believe that the tax strategy that has been laid out strikes the right balance in giving certainty about there being no further changes to tax thresholds until the end of this parliamentary session. That is the right thing to do.

As you well know, that is not what the First Minister said.

The key difference is the granular detail of what the plan will involve. That relates to a point that Michelle Thomson made about data. Ivan McKee is going much more into the detail of the figures relating to each and every public body, and every public body will be tasked with making its own plans for savings and reform down to a level of detail that might have been absent when there was a higher-level requirement for efficiency savings across the board, or for policies that were quite broad in nature. The difference is that each and every public body will be required to deliver a plan for efficiency, reform, sharing services and doing things differently. Doing nothing will not be an option, and the reform will be far more directed.