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Potentially, the impact could be significant.

But you would have had sight of them.

One concern is that there was obviously a lot going on in the background over an extended period. There is a question of transparency around all that. For many months, complaints were coming in and being dealt with, or not being dealt with, and people’s futures were potentially being compromised in one way or another. Over that entire period, whatever was going on behind closed doors was not really contributing to that. Would it have been better if it had been a more open process?

If the problem and the efforts to resolve it had been more open.

Would that not have been a governance issue?

Are you working with Audit Scotland on that? Once you have put the amended processes in place, will there be some sort of independent review of their adequacy, given the problems in the past?

Coming in at the tail end, I have had the opportunity to listen to your very comprehensive replies. I must thank you for them: you have covered a lot of ground.

I would like to ask you a couple of daft laddie questions. Since I can remember, we have been talking about support for women, helping them in the workplace and so on. It seems that over the years that has not been as successful as we might have hoped. Why is that? We are all talking about it, so why has not more happened? Is it because of lack of money? Is it lack of something else? We seem to talk about it all the time, but we do not actually make the progress that people would like. Maybe Ruth Boyle could first give us her thoughts on that.

Given that we are talking about budgets and that everything, at the end of the day, comes back to money, has the money that has been put up for gender equality been well spent?

Carolyn, do you have a view?

Back in 2014, when ALFs were formed—we were probably optimistic in those days—the theory was that commercial income would be parked in them and drawn down against specific contracts as time went on. There does not seem to be much evidence that that has been a terribly successful strategy. It seems to me—but please confirm this or otherwise—that ALFs are a dying breed and that, as the funding that they received in 2014 dies, there will be no support for the colleges.