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Will the member take an intervention?

I am glad to hear that, as always, Mr Doris, you are being logical about all of this. I also feel that removing the intentionality provision is a no-brainer, to use your phrase. The purpose and effect document for my amendments will have been distributed to everyone in the committee, so I am not going to go through all of that.

As always, in order to get things right, I would be happy—and I am sure that the minister will be happy—to work our way through this. We need further change in this area. We have made changes already, but I do not think that that has necessarily gone as far as it needs to.

I understand Mr Balfour’s point about the very few individuals who might try to deliberately manipulate the system, but you can see from the purpose and effect documents that my amendments cover those points.

We are still failing some people—although fewer people than before—because the intentionality provision is still in place. I want to see that gone, because we cannot afford to fail anyone in this regard. As Mr Doris said in his remarks, this is a bit of a no-brainer. However, in order to get this right, I will continue to work with folk, as I am sure that others in this room will as well.

I wonder whether Mr Balfour could let us know, here and now, which parts of those amendments and which definitions he has a difficulty with.

As I said in my comments, I would like everyone in this Parliament to unite around this issue. I am willing to work with anyone in order to reach a point where we can deal with an issue that has caused great difficulty for many people across the country—many fewer people than previously, but we still have a way to go to improve it.

My plea to Mr Balfour and to others is, if there are genuine difficulties around definitions or technicalities or whatever it may be, I am willing to work with anyone to get it right.

I do not want to speak for Crisis, but I note that it has a representative in the public gallery. I have found the input of Crisis in all of this to be immensely beneficial. People might therefore want to take the time out to talk to it and engage with it on the subject.

For the record, the purpose and effect documents that I talked about were the Government’s, not ones that I put together.

Good morning, minister. I have a general question. In your discussions with the UK Government on the bill, has the Scottish Government taken the opportunity to reinforce its wish that all employment law be devolved to this Parliament?

I am sure that you will keep trying.

The hike in employer national insurance contributions was one of the top things on the agenda for Michies pharmacy. I will not go there today—we all know how damaging the NIC hike is. I want to look at some other issues. Sometimes, they are not the fault of Government per se, but we have not set the parameters well enough when it comes to dealing with business.

Bureaucracy gets a lot of business folk down. It seems that bureaucracy grows to a greater degree in certain parts of the country, and in certain public bodies, than in others. Let us stick with the pharmacy scenario, where data sharing is often a problem—Dr Malik may be more aware of that than me or anyone else. If somebody has come into a pharmacy for treatment to save them going to their general practitioner, data sharing can often be a problem. That is particularly the case in some parts of the country, although not in others.

How can we cut down on that bureaucracy, particularly if it has been built up by public bodies that seem to apply their own rules? How do we get this right for everyone and save business a huge amount of difficulty? Perhaps the Deputy First Minister could answer that first, and then Dr Malik.

You do not need to be, convener.

One of the frustrating things that has come out of Daniel Johnson’s contribution is the fact that local authorities have a lot of powers and flexibilities that they do not use. They can exempt business from various things, which they do not do. How will you get local government on board to follow the practices of the new deal for business and get things moving in certain places?

Has there been any movement from the new UK Government to allow for the devolution of employment law?

Good morning to the witnesses. I want to tease out your comments on cross-Government working.

Public health and the economy have been mentioned. I want to look at pharmacies. I visited a pharmacy in my constituency a couple of weeks ago. Discussion, of course, was about health issues and how pharmacies have been delivering more services. That conversation got into non-domestic rates and the hike in employer national insurance contributions, although that is an issue that is reserved to Westminster. It sometimes seems that there are no linkages between the likes of the health portfolio and the economy portfolio, and little policy changes can often make a huge difference to how a pharmacy operates and keeps its head above water.

My question is for the Deputy First Minister and Dr Malik. When policy decisions are being made in other portfolios, are people thinking about the impact on the economy as well as the impact on whatever policy area that portfolio covers—health, in my example?