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I want to follow up on what Mr Taylor said to Liz Smith about looking at changes during the year. I get the point that was made by Ross Greer—or whoever made it—that we should maybe have four reviews or that they should happen at fixed times. Will Mr Taylor unpack that a bit more? If we got a bit of extra money from Westminster through Barnett consequentials and the Government announced that it would be put into childcare or something like that, do you think that the Education, Children and Young People Committee or the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, for example, should then do a bit more work on that announcement? Would you suggest that committees might examine such matters more than they have done in the past?

Does that matter, though? Should we be worried about that, or do we just have to accept it?

Sometimes tax gets more complicated because we are trying to make it fairer and, if we make it simple, it is not so fair. Do you agree with that dichotomy?

So the ball would start to be in the Government’s court. It would propose three or four options in a particular area, and then committees, the Parliament and perhaps the public would discuss those options. Is that the kind of approach that you envisage?

In the section of the report on the transition from response to recovery, paragraph 28 says:

“the Scottish Government will need to have a clear understanding of how it plans to transition”.

Two lines further down, it says that the Scottish Government

“is also likely to need to maintain a flexible approach”.

It strikes me that those two points are somewhat in balance against each other. Is it possible to get a balance there?

That is quite an interesting thought. If the Government announced more money for health, who would then challenge it not to spend so much on health but to spend more on education? I do not know whether that is the role of this committee, but maybe it is up to it to consider that point in the future.

I will leave it at that. Thank you very much.

We need to be able to understand how the decision was made, even though it could have gone either way. That is helpful.

In your briefing paper, you made the point that there have been 300 spending announcements in the context of Covid. Was there an implied criticism there? Have there been too many announcements and too many funds? Has it all been too complex? Would we have done better to have just two funds—one for the health service and one for business—and just got on with it?

Most members have asked about the tracking of Covid expenditure. I will continue with that theme.

Is tracking Covid expenditure possible? Is it helpful or necessary? For example, if someone’s operation—a hip replacement, say—has been postponed because of Covid and they now need more painkillers while they wait and they have to see a nurse or a general practitioner, how do we track the cost of the painkillers and the appointment with the nurse or GP? The nurse and the GP are there anyway, and the appointment is not directly related to Covid, but we could say that those costs came about because of Covid. There is never going to be a right answer to how that spending is tracked. I can see arguments on both sides, so surely a judgment has to be made. Will you comment on that?

On that point, we have had restrictions for the past year and a half, most of which have been brought in at two or three days’ notice. This one is the slowest that we have ever done; it has had the most consultation and discussion of any of the restrictions that we have had up to now. Do you have the same criticism of all the other restrictions that we have had, such as closing schools? Have all of those failed from a human rights perspective?

We have lost Ms Robertson. Maybe Professor Montgomery can answer.