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That was helpful.

Perhaps I can stick with you for just a minute. On the point about the state perhaps supporting more training for younger people but less for older workers, I have a small firm in my constituency that takes two apprentices every year. It deliberately takes one younger and one older apprentice, because it sees the advantage in having both, but it gets more support for the younger apprentice.

Going back to the issue of post-employment skills development, I believe that you said that it was terrible and that we should remove disincentives in that respect. What did you mean by that?

Thank you.

Katy Heidenreich, I imagine that your sector keeps training its workers even when they are older. Am I correct? Are businesses afraid of losing their workers as a result of that training, or is that just part of the industry?

I am interested in the phrase “gender ghettoisation”. I will give the final word on age to Paul Hunter, but if you want to mention gender, I would be happy to hear about that as well.

Mark Logan, the digital side is seen as being for young people. Are there enough older people in that area? Should older people be getting more training in it?

Thank you, convener. I have nothing to declare either.

We have covered quite a lot of areas already. I want to pick up on the topic of older and younger workers, which we have heard a few comments on. Professor Simms talked about older workers struggling to find work. Paul Hunter talked about soft skills, including critical thinking, which I imagine quite a lot of older people would have, and agility, which maybe we think of younger people as having. We have also had input from organisations. Highlands and Islands Enterprise talked about competition for young people, and UK Hospitality talked about Scotland just not having enough workers.

I wonder whether we—that is, the public sector and the Government—can do more to help older workers. Have we put too much emphasis on younger workers in the past?

I was concentrating on age, but you have brought in the issue of gender, which I find interesting. Is that an issue that has to be sorted at school? Is that the stage at which intervention would ensure that we get more girls into information technology?

On that point, before I come to Mr Boyle, you are arguing that, just as there has been a need for extra tax for care services, we could put in place—we would have to choose whether we wanted to do so—a tax for extra preventative spending. That could be done to launch it all, in a sense. We all seem to have said that we cannot cut anything, so we will wait until we have extra money, and once we have that, we will put it into preventative care, and that is never going to happen.

Mr Boyle, you can comment on that, too. I was interested that you said that it would be better to measure how safe people are rather than how many police we have. As an auditor, do you think that that would be practical? I did a tiny bit of auditing earlier in my life and I know that measuring the number of police is easier than measuring people’s safety. If we were safer but had fewer police, what would Liz Smith, the Daily Record and everybody else complain about? [Laughter.]

Before I bring in the other witnesses, that leads me on to another thought. The point has been made that one of the Christie principles was about more joint working, collaboration and so on. Out of that came the health and social care partnerships or integration joint boards, whatever they are currently called, but from my perspective, those are just another kind of new body. Professor Mitchell talked about ensuring that we do not simply add more institutions, but now, instead of a situation in which I either write to the chief executive of the health board or the chief executive of the council, I have a third option, as I can also write to the chief executive of the integration joint board.

My question for you all is whether that kind of thing—not necessarily IJBs specifically, but more generally—has been a mistake or has not worked in the way that it was meant to. If so, why is that the case?