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Universities may, of course, choose to do that. The point that I am making is that the SFC will make a judgment on the seriousness of the University of Dundee’s circumstances and whether there are measures that the university can take, as other universities have done. The University of Edinburgh and Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen are examples of universities that have taken steps to address the issues that they faced. The measures that RGU took, painful as they were, were designed not only to address an immediate problem but to put the university on a sound footing. It should be said that the financial planning of all universities has been undermined. The ENICs situation was a nasty surprise for them, and they are all having to find money to address that.

I do not know whether you raised that question with the SFC earlier. The money has been given, as we stated, for the purposes that we stated. I would envisage, given the seriousness of the situation at Dundee, that the overwhelming majority of the money would be utilised for that purpose, but the SFC will make a judgment call based on its assessment of the situation there and set against any other institutions that might identify as having issues.

I was quite struck by Mr Brown’s question last week—

Sorry. The investigation as to how the situation arose is being conducted independently on behalf of the university, I think. We would expect the SFC to have sight of that, and it is my expectation that it will be available publicly. That is the very least that the staff deserve, and, in my opinion, the Parliament has a role in overseeing that.

There is another balance to be struck here. Yes, universities are autonomous institutions—you said that it is not for the taxpayer to bail an institution out—but they are major players in local economies. The University of Dundee employs 3,000 people, which is hugely important in the city and the wider area. It also plays a part in the wider landscape of our higher education offering for Scotland and helps to attract students from all over. Universities are hugely important institutions.

I do not disagree with you that an environment can be created in which it might be thought that it does not matter how you run an institution, because you will be bailed out by the taxpayer. That is a consideration. It is also the case that universities receive varying degrees of their income from public sources. For some universities, public funds are minimal—I think that roughly 25 per cent of the University of Dundee’s income is derived from public sources.

It is about more than just money, though, Mr Brown. Although I absolutely accept your point, it is about the importance of institutions—not only the University of Dundee—in the overall landscape in Scotland and the economy. Universities play a hugely important part in Scotland, and it is important that we preserve them.

Actually, I do recall that, when I looked at the evidence, I saw that he had said that. That is not my recollection of the reasons. I will look into the matter again, but my understanding is that it was for the reasons that I have just given you.

Principally, we thought that, because of the focus on the targets, it was important that the commissioner’s continued focus in assisting us was on the university piece. Nevertheless, I understand his argument. I am not going to sit here today and roll that out—that will be an on-going conversation with him. We disagree on that point, but he understands our reasons. That is where we were then, but the position might change in the future.

The door is not closed. This committee might decide to include the issue in its report, and we will respond to it.

It is important to understand the context in which all this has been taken forward, which involves genuine collaborative work between the Government, universities and colleges. We have approached the issue from the point of view of accepting that the blunt measure that we currently have represents a barrier, and that there might be something else that we could do. Including free school meals as a measure was suggested as an option by the university sector, particularly by the universities in Aberdeen, where a unique data-sharing arrangement is already in place between the local councils and the two universities, so it made sense to pilot the idea there.

There are difficulties with scaling that up, which the universities have identified. The pilot has, self-evidently, given us a bit of a test bed to look at how it might work in practice. We ought to use free school meals as a measure if we can, notwithstanding the data-sharing issues. We have also looked at the school clothing grant, which was another possibility but, again, we run into data-sharing issues.

As I said, we have come at this from the point of view of asking what the art of the possible is here. There is a strong argument that, although SIMD20 is the driver, universities would benefit from having a basket of measures that they could dip in and out of. We are keen to put as many measures—or tools, if you like—at their disposal in order to achieve what we all want to achieve.

My understanding is that the pilot in the north-east is quite far progressed with regard to moving into the delivery phase. There was a slight delay on the part of one of the councils, but the expectation is that the pilot will be up and running fairly quickly, and that we will probably be in a position to assess its success or otherwise by late autumn, which would give us a sense of how it has worked.

We must first determine that that is the only route that we could take. None of the bills—given their parameters, taken at face value—would capture that. You will understand the risks of broadening out a bill at the last minute—it is not something that we think is viable.