Seòmar agus comataidhean

What do you assume the timeline will be? Will it be three months until we get the Scottish figures?

We are all dependent on the UK Government. Do you not have a clear timeline for all of that?

You pointed out that it is positive that we now have a public sector pay policy, but there are some caveats. You and the Scottish Government are assuming that there will be a pay envelope of 9 per cent over three years, or a 3 per cent pay uplift for one year. It has been mentioned that 4.5 per cent would be the average pay growth, which is not in the forecast figures. Can we infer that the assumption is that there will be a reduction in staffing?

Something does not add up if you are assuming that staffing will stay roughly the same, yet all those extra costs are coming in. How does that fit in with the figures?

We have spent a bit of time looking at your forecasts on earnings and those of the OBR, which are different. Some of that is real—it is not just about your opinions but about the fact that the labour market is a bit tighter.

A lot of that went into housing and house-building capacity, did it not?

You say that house prices have been more resilient than you expected and that that has had an impact on land and buildings transaction tax. Will you comment on that? In the past, we have had doom merchants saying that our higher rates of LBTT would scare everyone off and that no one would buy a house, but that is clearly not the case at the moment.

I presume that that would be affected by whether the Government decided to build more poor-quality houses and fewer passive houses or high-quality houses.

Where do financial transactions come in? We heard a lot about them in the past, but we have not heard very much about them this year.

To go back for a minute to the two-child limit, did the Government give you any reason as to why it made its announcement on that so late?