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I am going to ask you about the medium-term financial strategy and then I will ask about workforce reform to finish.

I think that the medium-term financial strategy paints a rather grim picture. You say that the financial position of the Scottish public sector is unsustainable. To me, that suggests profligate spending habits by the Government. At a household level, if you spent more than you were taking in for any period of time, you would pretty soon be in trouble. The Government is not going to go bust, but if it continues down the road that it is on, what could happen?

Legally, the Scottish Government has to produce a balanced budget. We know that. However, when you are forecasting figures such as a gap of £2.6 billion in 2029-30, that is unsustainable and we cannot carry on like that. What will happen if we continue down that road with those massive and growing gaps?

I will come on to workforce reform, on which you have a number of paragraphs in the report. In paragraph 56, you say the PSRS, which I am guessing is the public sector reform strategy,

“sets out how the Scottish Government aims to increase the pace and scale of reform. The public sector in Scotland is a larger proportion of the employed population than in the rest of the UK and therefore presents additional financial challenges.”

My question is about the size of the public sector as a proportion of the employed population. Does that figure need to come down?

Okay. [Interruption.] There is a problem with the mics, so you might have to turn yours off manually. Thank you.

The information about the kitchen is reassuring. What is not reassuring is that it appears that we have in this organisation a very lax approach to spending money. I accept that it raises a lot of money and generates income for the taxpayer. However, that does not give someone the right, if they work for Historic Environment Scotland, to spend money as they wish, which appears, in some cases at least, to have been happening. That cannot just have been down to the lack of an accountable officer for six months, can it?

When you come back—I think in January—we will be asking for a lot more detail on some of this stuff. Okay, I will move on.

There are 125 devolved public bodies. Do you know what the combined budget for those is?

To end, I will ask you about pay policy. Before I do, however, I will stick to this issue. If 22 per cent of the workforce is employed in the public sector, is there a Government target for getting that down? That is a policy decision. Is there a policy?

The upshot is that if you ignore your own pay policy and give awards that are outwith that policy, something else has to give.

When we think about public service reform—and you are always talking about public service reform—and when we look at the number of devolved public bodies, do you see an opportunity for making savings? There are a lot of bodies. Some functions could be merged, as could some bodies, and some bodies that are maybe not so necessary could be got rid of. Have you done any analysis on that?

Thank you convener. [Interruption.] My microphone seems not to be working. It is now.

I will stick to the theme and ask about Historic Environment Scotland, which appears in the consolidated accounts. As you said earlier, you have produced a report on it, which was out yesterday. I was aghast when I read it. It reminded me of WICS and the work that we did on that. Some aspects of the report were very familiar.

HES had no chief executive or accountable officer for six months. There were other aspects that I found very concerning, and that is concerning in itself.

Complimentary tickets were dished out for events at HES venues almost willy-nilly. I do not know how many people were involved.

There were over 400 electronic purchasing cards—maybe there still are—and one in four members of staff had those cards.

There were some specific examples of wholly inappropriate spending, including on a leaving do for a board member. Public money was used for somebody’s leaving do, including for a bar bill. I think that some of that was repaid. Some money was spent on a replacement kitchen. I do not know whether that was somebody’s personal kitchen or whether it was at an HES venue—it is not clear—but that bust the spending limit. There was also £2.9 million on the cancelled archive house project in Bonnyrigg.

Then we have—and this was very familiar from the WICS report—spending on foreign travel, almost half of which was not properly authorised. It gives the impression of an organisation in which controls are lax; in fact, spending was out of control. Would you concur with my analysis?

Thank you. I will finish with a question on public sector pay policy. You mention it in paragraph 58, which I think is a significant paragraph. It refers to that policy, but the Government ignored the policy and rolled over to the unions. [Interruption.] Yes, I did not think that the convener would like that one, but that is what happened. As you say in the report,

“This introduces additional recurring financial pressures in the short term and has not mitigated the future year risks given many of the two-year deals agreed include inflation guarantees.”

Presumably, you think that the approach taken there is unsustainable.