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I do not disagree with that. The UK clearly cannot get to net zero without what is happening in Scotland. Of course, I would cheekily argue that it cannot get to net zero without the north and the north-east, including the Highlands and Islands. That means that a lot of the focus is on Scotland.

Some of the figures for the economic activity, the export potential of our energy and the investments that are being made are astonishing. The opportunity is huge, but it requires an equally huge response from the Government. We cannot do that within the fiscal framework, in part because of the sums of funding that are involved. We have a capital budget of about £5 billion a year and you know our limits on borrowing. Take ScotWind as one example. Those who have won the leases have, between them all, pledged £25 billion of investment in the supply chain. We have an annual capital budget of £5 billion that is designed to go on hospitals, roads and everything else.

The opportunity is huge. Any other country will respond to that huge opportunity with an equally huge offer. If we want, for example, to take stakes in businesses in the supply chain and ensure that the supply chain is able to respond, the level of demand on a capital level far outstrips the small budget that we have with our enterprise agencies and the Scottish National Investment Bank. The remarkable thing is that GB energy will not do anything over and above what is already happening with the Scottish National Investment Bank and other players: it will not provide any significant additional capacity. I am delighted that it is to be based in Scotland. It has a role to play. That is great and it is creating a hive of activity around it. However, to meet the scale of need, we all need to get real and get with what people are pledging to invest.

We have a £55 billion overall budget. Just one ScotWind leasing round—it is not even innovation and targeted oil and gas, and it is not onshore, but just offshore—represents £25 billion, which is half the Scottish Government’s budget. That illustrates the scale of what we are talking about.

We set out in our hydrogen action plan the decisions that we would take on hydrogen. As you said, there have been a number of pilots and pockets of activity in hydrogen. I know about the level of activity of interested investors, developers and energy companies that want to explore and develop it, so there is a lot of optimism about the potential.

The key in all the energy industries is to turn potential into reality. We need to work at pace to turn potential interest from investors and developers into activity on the ground. For example, the need to develop the infrastructure for export and build will require close alignment with the UK Government. The big sticking point with generation of renewable energy, particularly offshore wind, is access to the grid.

At the moment, our engagement is positive. We have had a lot of face-to-face engagement. I know that the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, and Gillian Martin have had a number of face-to-face discussions about what each side needs to be doing, but the industry cannot wait for us to keep talking. It needs to see some shared partnership working in getting things done.

Some things have been done around two recent investments. The investment in Ardersier, which we talk about extensively, is about infrastructure and upgrading the facilities there, thereby creating opportunities for other developers to come in. That investment was joint UK Government and Scottish Government funding. The other example is the UK Infrastructure Bank’s investment in Hunterston and XLCC, which complements some funding that the Scottish Government has committed. Those are two examples. We can point to those and see active investment in infrastructure.

The message that I have been sharing is that if the UK Government wants to achieve its aims around energy, it should let us take the lead in Scotland. We, jointly with industry, can give a clear steer on the changes that we need to see in short order. The UK Government, in its early weeks and months, has had a big focus on getting GB energy set up, but when it comes to those questions, we know what needs to be done. It is a clear list, and it is about making the changes and speaking with one voice to give reassurance to those who are minded to invest and are looking at whether they should stay here or go to our European neighbours. A lot of the investors who come to Scotland go on to Scandinavian or European countries. They have options, so we need to ensure that they are here.

I realise that I have been talking at length about investment. Richard Rollison is leading a lot of the work on attracting investment.

I agree with your point about the supply chain. There is a sequence to that. We need to get some of the major developments, particularly offshore, through consenting and planning and into a phase where they are about to build and have pledged funding. In advance of that point, they will look to the Scottish domestic supply chain, and it will be the services and products that are at the most advanced stage that will be able to support the wind or hydrogen opportunities. If they do not exist, investors will look overseas.

I draw a distinction between funding that is spent on digital infrastructure and funding that is spent on technological advancement or digital innovation. We are spending considerable sums of money on the reaching 100 per cent programme. We expect R100 contracts to connect more than 112,000 premises across Scotland before 2028.

The bit that I am more interested in, and that I think you are more interested in, if I am reading you correctly, is innovation. There has been a huge amount of work on that, and one of my priorities is to try to support innovation in the NHS. Neil Gray and I are both leading on that. In a matter of weeks after I came into the Government, we established a round table with a lot of the NHS boards, including the key procurement people in the NHS boards, and some of the most exciting businesses that are working in life sciences, supported by university research and development centres and so on.

The issue that came through from those in life sciences was that their biggest challenge is access to the NHS, and the NHS said that its biggest challenge is that it has to do things in a way that enjoys the public’s support and confidence, so it needs to interact with research and development in a sensitive and careful way. However, some significant progress on innovation in the NHS has come from those conversations.

I talked briefly about the digital dermatology programme, which has been months in the making. It was launched this month and is due to be embedded in 90 per cent of Scotland during the next few months. Use of that technology will massively reduce waiting times for dermatology appointments. The point about that story is that I am not talking about something really exciting in the life sciences sector that is still years away from implementation; that programme is being implemented now.

Technology is one of the most compelling answers to the challenges faced by our NHS. Similar technological advancement is going on for treatment for cancer and diabetes, and we are at the stage of that being implemented in one health board with a view to its being rolled out across all health boards. Mark Logan is supporting that work, and he is bringing his style of thinking to the work of the NHS.

We certainly moved away from the idea of the business hub, because we wanted to integrate that in the general ecosystem instead of having one site. That decision was based on feedback from women working in that sector.

On the issue of budget decisions, we will continue investing as much as we can in our overall work on digital technology. We have announced a number of funds since 2021 and are investing in female entrepreneurship through every budget, so there is no £50 million pot waiting to be drawn from.

I think that we are, but I note that there are two big drivers of the short-term decision making. The first is the nature of the funding. We need, once and for all, to get beyond the year-to-year annual budget setting; I am hopeful that the UK Government might help us in that. Our local authorities need it, and we in Government need it. If we could get a really decent spending review from the UK Government—I think that the review is coming next spring—that could give us long-term certainty on funding and it would be much easier to plan for the longer term.

The second driver has been the number of short-term challenges with which we have been grappling. Emerging from the Covid pandemic, which in itself was a short-term emergency shock, we have then had the cost of living emergency shock and a number of additional pressures that are driven by the inflationary environment, and which have meant that we have had to take immediate decisions.

We have the inputs, which is the funding position, and the outputs, which is the demand. If we can get an element of stability and get through the challenges, and if we can work collaboratively with the UK Government—as we are doing right now—on the longer-term points, that starts to set us up to make those decisions.

I will make another brief point. Shona Robison has had to make very difficult choices, and I know that Michael Marra has been scrutinising those decisions and holding us all to account for them. However, if we can make some of those difficult decisions now, that sets us up to be able to think about funding for the longer term on some of the biggest and most impactful changes that are required to give others longer-term stability with regard to what actually works.

No, because I think that we are making those decisions. That resource spending review was published in 2022, and I still stand by it; I know the amount of work that went into producing it. Nevertheless, it was published immediately prior to the emergence of double-digit levels of inflation and pay deals that mirrored the rocketing cost of living. Good grown-up Governments do not simply make plans and then stick their fingers in their ears and ignore what is happening around them. Good Governments are conscious of what is happening while sticking to the long-term ambitions of their plan.

In the past few months in particular, Shona Robison has made difficult choices to set us up for the long term, which is actually very much in the spirit of the spending review that I published in spring 2022.

Let me take on board the first half of your question, which was on how committed we are. I will come on to that.

I challenge again the idea that the consultation should have been broader—in other words, about our doing more things. That is what sits uncomfortably with me. We should have a streamlined and focused approach, which is ultimately much easier to embed and much easier to measure. The proposed revisions that we have made will enable us to streamline and focus the work that we are doing.

On the consultation itself, we have made changes where there was a strong evidence base of the need for change. We have introduced new outcomes—you will know that there are new outcomes on care, housing and climate—in areas where we had significant support to make changes. On the flipside, some stakeholders have cautioned against increasing the total number of outcomes, which goes back to my point about having a streamlined and focused approach.

You asked at the beginning about the extent to which the NPF is embedded in the Government. In any sort of political cycle, in the tidal waves of politics coming and going, there will always be pressure to lift our eyes off the outcomes that we have set out in the national performance framework. During my time in government I have seen an increasing awareness of the national performance framework and an increasing desire to align our policy work with it.

That has been most visible in finance and is most visible when it comes to the budget. It has meant that there has been very stark conversations about where the national performance framework outcomes clash with one another, because at times they do. At times Government, and indeed Parliament, has to make a conscious choice about what it is going to focus on, and sometimes you see that.

I just talked about two new outcomes on housing and climate. I am in Shetland, so I will use this example. I was told yesterday that the council here has a choice to make. Should it decarbonise the houses that it already has with the money that it has, or should it build more houses? Let us not pretend that all these decisions are easy, and let us not pretend that there are not still further questions to answer when it comes to embedding all the national performance framework in our policy work, because I do not think anyone would disagree with the picture that we are painting with the national performance framework. We would all like to live in a Scotland where all those outcomes are met, but the business of Government requires us to start with those outcomes and then figure out the most effective way of delivering them through policy.

To my mind, economic growth it is not an end in itself. The end is the outcomes that are captured in the national performance framework. When we talk about economic growth, that is about making Scotland more prosperous and fairer, and it is a means of delivering against our environmental ambitions. It is a means to an end.

I would be reluctant to embed economic growth as a national outcome in and of itself, as that would be confusing means and ends. We do not celebrate economic growth as an end in itself. I want to live in communities where there is fairness, where everybody is paid a fair wage, where there is no fuel poverty, where there are better health outcomes and so on. I could go through the whole list, but I will not.

That is what the UN sustainable development goals are about—ensuring that there is fairness and equality across the board. I would far rather that that fairness was a result of people having high-level incomes, and that is where we need more economic growth. However, that is not an end in itself; it is a means to the ends that are captured in the national performance framework.