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I have only one other question. You have made some comments that suggest that there has been constructive and even positive dialogue with Kirsty MacDonald and SATH. However, having gone through the written materials and caught up on where things reached before, it seems that the SQA and SATH have almost had an utterly dysfunctional relationship.

Do you agree with that? I can maybe guess your answer. How typical is your relationship with SATH compared to the relationship with other stakeholders that you deal with? Is it different with SATH or pretty much in the same space?

Thanks for that. I have one final question, and it relates to John Mason’s question, which I think was about a concern that the income is not washing the face of the expenditure that you are incurring. The reasons that you have given relate to helping people who are low paid and so on, or to helping people to become volunteers more easily. A contrasting point would be that, for example, if you were to become a volunteer minibus driver, you would not be exempted from having to pay the test fee that is needed for that.

It is a generous scheme, but I wonder whether, next year or in the future, it will be your intention, minister, to try to restore the equilibrium, if possible, between the cost of providing the service and the income that you receive for it.

Thanks.

Will that report have objective standards that people will accept, if you know what I mean? Will it be quite a compelling report, and not just someone’s opinion?

Before I go to Professor Cardwell with the same question, I invite Ellie Bevan to talk about the benefits of the programme in Wales.

I will first give a bit of context before I ask the question, because I want to make sure that the question is well understood. I entirely agree and accept the point about the soft power element and the generational impact that the exchanges that we have had over many years have had, and I think that we underestimate soft power at our peril.

I participated in an exchange scheme at university for a year—not in the EU. I do not know whether I deserve praise or blame for this, but I was the first one to go to Canada on the scheme, and I was followed a few years later by someone who is now a Conservative member of the Parliament, which shows that when you have established that link, it grows over time. As a result, we also had people coming from Canada to Dundee university.

I will not go down the fruitless avenue of trying to compare Turing with Erasmus. I agree with the UK Government—I do not often say that—when it says that doing so is comparing two different types of activities. However, is there a danger that the institutions and the students involved overestimate the complexity of what is now required to continue these exchange schemes? The scheme that I was on in the 1980s had no support from the British Council or anybody else—the university just did it with another university in Canada, and, of course, that involved visas and so on. They just had an agreement that no fees would exchange hands and that they would support accommodation and food and so on. Is there a danger that, because it was so easy and seamless before, we do not take the full opportunities because there will be complication and bureaucracy? We keep comparing the situation with what we had before.

For what it is worth, I think that we should never have left the EU. It has been a disaster in many ways, and every local authority area in Scotland voted to stay in. However, is it not the case that the memory of what was there before and how easy it was might prevent us from taking up the full raft of potential opportunities? I invite my namesake, Mr Brown, to respond first.

I will come to Ms Bevan shortly, because I know that that question was probably less relevant—

That was my next question. Professor Cardwell referred to challenges with attracting North American students, but those problems were overcome in a fairly straightforward way in the 1980s, when things were perhaps more complex, in some ways. I am not sure what has changed since then, although, there have certainly been changes to visas and so on in the US.

I have a question about what Peter Brown has just said. I do not need to be convinced about the value and benefits of programmes such as these. When I came back from Canada, a woman followed me and married me and gave birth to our three children, who are Canadian Scots, so a link was established with the Maritimes and Canada that had not been there before.

Peter Brown made a point about peace; I think that peace and understanding are key here, but they are very hard to quantify—although, of course, the EU was awarded the Nobel peace prize, because of its ability to diminish the prospect of war after the second world war. The way to try to convince Governments of whichever stripe to reinstate such programmes and, I hope, to reverse Brexit, is to be much more explicit about the benefits. I am not sure that we have done that; I think that we have taken them for granted. What metrics can we use to measure the value of soft power in order to make a more effective case for exchange schemes to continue in future?

That was not my personal view—the Government said that.

Thank you.