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That is really helpful. Perhaps those are questions for Government departments to answer in the future.

I will move the conversation on to strategic commercial assets, on which your report helpfully provides some analysis. The strategic commercial assets division is a fairly new venture, in governance terms. My understanding is that it employs around 40 staff and spends a considerable amount of money on external consultants. I use the word “considerable”, which is subjective. It spent £1.6 million last year. Is there any indication of the cost of that operation to the Government? In your opinion, does it represent good value? It is a fairly new set-up.

I guess that that is the question. We know the total value of money invested from the public purse and we know what it was thought might be recoverable, or what the value of the loan was, which is not necessarily the value of the business itself. That would be a whole other conversation. That value seems to have jumped up massively. Are you confident that there is sufficient rationale for what is almost a doubling of the recoverable value of the loans?

I look forward to that work, if it occurs.

It is interesting that you picked up on local government. That is the only line in the accounts that seems to suggest an overspend—of £5 million. Every other budget line that has been presented to us has a considerable underspend, totalling £509 million—half a billion pounds. Is that normal? I am new to the committee, but a £0.5 billion underspend, in the final outturn versus the budget, seems like an awful lot of money.

Auditor General, you will be aware that the vessels were supposed to cost under £100 million—that is, for both. The latest figure, back in March, was £300 million. My suspicion is that it might have gone up since then, given the further problems that have been encountered at the yard. You do not state that that does not sound like value for money, but you allude to it. Is that your assessment?

From a public expenditure point of view, if that £100 million becomes £350 million or £400 million, is there not a risk that costs will endlessly spiral? Is there a mechanism for intervening and saying, “Look—you can’t just keep chucking money at something endlessly”? Those figures seem to show massive jumps, not little increments of overspend, so when you look at budget versus what is actually being spent—when things are going massively over budget, by hundreds of millions of pounds, in a very short space of time—what is the cut-off?

I look forward to that.

At this point, I have to ask you to help me to understand what is reasonably complex auditing language, and to put it in layman’s terms for politicians and the wider public who, perhaps, are not qualified in that regard. I am looking at exhibit 2, which is about the specific strategic commercial assets—that is, Glasgow Prestwick Airport Ltd, Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) Ltd and, of course, the Liberty Steel smelter and Burntisland Fabrications Ltd. I wonder whether you can help me to understand what you are reporting there, given the strong interest that this committee and others have shown in the matter for a number of years.

Each of the entities will have a perceived value, as the Government has stated that there is an intention to return them to private ownership in the future. Alongside that, though, there is the issue of the money that has already been invested by the public purse in those businesses, normally by way of loans, some of which appear on the balance sheet in the consolidated accounts. Can you talk us through what you are seeing at the moment? What is the bigger picture with those assets? Shall we start with Prestwick?

To put it in simple terms, what rationale would the Government present for the increase in the numbers? The value of Prestwick has doubled whereas, for Ferguson Marine—albeit that it is a small percentage of the money that has been invested—the £304 million that has been invested now sits at a value of £94 million, which is less than a third. What factors are you seeing that give you comfort that those are true and accurate assumptions?

This is reminding me of “The Antiques Roadshow”, because things are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. How do you marry that with the value of the loans in the consolidated accounts? At what point would you, as auditor general, say that the Government is not being realistic about the opportunity to recover its investments? It could very well just say up front, “Look, we’re going to write these assets off, because we don’t expect any future owner of the assets to give us any of the money back.” Is there some pretence that it might get some of the money back, and this is just a risk assessment of how much it might recover? It just sounds like a very subjective approach to what has been invested and how much might be lost.

I see from your report that, as of the end of March this year, the total outstanding capital borrowing was £1.76 billion, and the amount that was borrowed for capital projects was less than the cap. Therefore, there is still a bit of wriggle room, so if the Government wanted to borrow more money for capital projects, more money would be available.