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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?

For my last point, I will return to Professor Mitchell. You said that, during Covid, we have seen action. In Glasgow, we got cycle lanes quickly, although there was no consultation with the community. To my mind, that immediately suggests that there has been a trade-off. Consultation will take place on whether the cycle lanes are to be permanent, but it did not happen before they were put in. We also got off the street most people who were sleeping on the street, but that meant that people who were overcrowded in their housing could not get another house. I presume that the answer to that is to provide more housing. Will such trade-offs always exist?

That is possible.

Minister, you told the convener that some funding would be allocated in the spring budget revision. Can you explain why that cannot be done now?

You also said that there was a Barnett guarantee last year. We knew the minimum that we were going to get. What is the worst case scenario? Is it that all of the extra UK funding would be just a reallocation of existing funding and we would not get any consequentials?

So the UK budget and spending review have an impact on 2021-22 as well as on 2022-23.

The discussion has been very interesting and has covered a lot of ground; I realise that I am the last questioner.

Coming from an accounting background, I want to pin down some numbers, especially with Professor Mitchell. You said that we should be bolder, so I was going to ask whether we should, for example, take 10 per cent off the hospital budget and put it into primary care. However, you then said that we can do things only incrementally. Would it be useful to have some fixed concept over the next few years, whereby we give, say, 1 per cent less than we might have to secondary hospital care and 1 per cent—or the equivalent figure—more to primary care? That might give us something solid that we as a committee could agree on and then put to Parliament. After all, as everyone has pointed out, we have not made the progress that we might have done.

That is helpful. I will move to a slightly different angle. Brian Whittle asked about groups, including ethnic minority groups, with a lower vaccine uptake. I was struck by the geographical spread of uptake. SPICe provided us with some figures. For example, 96.4 per cent of people in East Dunbartonshire have had two doses, whereas the figure for Glasgow, which I happen to represent, is only 78.9 per cent. That seems to be quite a variation. Should I be worried about that?

Our advisers suggested that we look at why people are not getting vaccinated and that we perhaps need to do more work on that. The three words that they used were “complacency”, “confidence” and “convenience”, as the things that are stopping people or that we can encourage. Some people are complacent about getting vaccinated—certification probably helps with that. On the confidence issue, do we just have to accept that there is a core element of the population that will just not be vaccinated no matter what we do, or do we need to do more work in that area?