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I will leave it there.

I understood that, but it is a useful clarification. I guess that the danger is that you fall into the trap of thinking that we have always had the extra consequentials and expecting to have them again in future. I take that point.

On the difference between the OBR growth forecast and the forecast growth in Scotland, I want to unpack what is contained in your forecast. We have had a change. I understand the points about holding the thresholds rather than inflating them, and about the decision at UK level to have a 19p basic rate in future years. However, if we strip those out, it appears that, since December, the commission’s forecast for earnings growth in Scotland has deteriorated. Certainly, it is clear that earnings growth in Scotland is slower than that in the rest of the UK. Can you provide any insight into what changes have occurred since December and what the likely consequences are?

I do not think that I was suggesting arbitrary targets or that the timeframe was 12 months. I appreciate that the timeframe is four to five years. You might not want to put a number on it, but if you are going to maintain the health service head count in broad terms, albeit with some change, and if you have that macro figure but are going to protect the half of the increase that is in the health service, other areas will have to be reduced by more than the figure than they increased by. That is an arithmetic necessity, is it not? You do not necessarily need to put a figure on it, but the head count reduction in the civil service will need to be more than the 3,800 it went up by in the Covid period.

Let me avoid the figures altogether. If the aggregate point is going to come out at 29,500 and some areas are not going to have to return to pre-Covid levels, other areas will have to go further. Is that a statement of fact?

Even if we consider spend on employability, it is really only in the past year that that has gone up by any significant amount. Therefore, you have four budget lines which—certainly in the early years—will all probably experience significant real terms cuts. Almost certainly, on aggregate across the five years, skills spending will have an aggregate cut. If you want to drive up average earnings, is that not inconsistent?

I want to go back to the public sector head count. The aim is to return it to pre-Covid levels, and I accept and understand that you say that that will be done essentially through capping the total payroll at value, but not in terms of levels.

However, there will be a certain arithmetical outcome from that. As John Mason pointed out, half of the 30,000 staff are in the NHS, but its workforce will not be reduced. Therefore, in the remaining areas, there are two options: reducing people’s pay or reducing the head count. If you maintain the NHS head count at what it is, and that is half of the total number, that means that the other areas will need to reduce their head count by double the amount that they have increased it by. I just want to highlight that. From quarter 4 of 2019-20 to quarter 4 of 2020-21, there was an increase of 4,000 posts in the civil service, 7,000 in local government and 5,000 in public corporations. You refuse to be drawn on local government, but you do have control of the civil service head count. Will we see a reduction of 8,000 civil servants in the Scottish Government?

Thank you. One area that you disputed at your statement last week was the overall position on productivity growth and wage growth in Scotland. The Scottish Fiscal Commission is clear; in paragraph 3.39 of its report, it states that

“Productivity growth has stalled in Scotland since 2015.”

Likewise, on its projections of income tax receipts, the Scottish Fiscal Commission is clear that wage growth in Scotland is slower than the UK average. That is a trend that goes back to 2016 according to ONS figures; not a single Scottish region outperformed the UK average in that period.

Prior to 2016, Scotland typically outperformed the UK average. I am not talking about the higher performing areas of the UK, but the UK average. Do you accept that that is a fact, and is there sufficient focus on driving up jobs and wages? Ultimately, that is what we need to do to increase the amount of money that we have to spend on public services, and because it is a good in and of itself.

I guess it is a question of whether it is a correction or an on-going cycle.

Following directly on from the point about future Barnett consequentials, are you confident that the Government’s approach is sufficiently robust? It sounds almost as though it is being too granular and that there is therefore quite a large contingency in those forecast consequentials in future years. Is that the position that the commission has taken or the fear that the commission has?

I am merely trying to clarify the choices that you have made, and this is clearly one of them.