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I am sure that there will be opportunities for Parliament to address those issues with the Government. Other members will probably delve into the specifics of some of those gaps.

I will conclude my questioning by making a wider point. Auditor General, you said that much of the strategy is down to prioritisation or choices. I presume that those are policy choices that are under the control of ministers. Is there an intrinsic conflict between, for example, pure economic growth and the wellbeing economy? Is it difficult for Governments to balance those two different policies? The strategies for both approaches might take them in very different directions.

My questions carry on nicely from the conversation that we have just had about progress on the action points. You said that you do not have a view as to whether 78 or 79 actions are enough or too many, or whether there is the right spread across the six areas, but let us have a look at where we are in terms of auditing.

I am looking at the figures for actions completed under the first four measures, which are more business orientated and are centred around specific interventions rather than things such as diversity, fairness and culture. At the risk of sounding like a football results announcer, the figures are: entrepreneurial people and culture, one; new market opportunities, nil; productive businesses and regions, one; skilled workforce, nil. The figures are pretty poor. Does your audit work lead you to be concerned that we are simply not making enough progress on some of the actions?

I hope that we are not saying that we will have to wait for eight years before we can determine whether the strategy has worked. I am not sure how many of the committee’s current members would be here to question you, or indeed whom we would be questioning. Surely we should have a rolling brief on that, which should be produced annually.

We look forward to that. There are wide expectations about whose role it is to follow the money. It is sometimes hard to follow every pound of public money that is spent by various means—for example, to see which directorate is funding what, which grants are available, where investment is made and where nationalisation has occurred. We need to follow those routes to determine whether there have been good returns on investment and whether the objectives of the NSET and other Government strategies have been met.

My goodness, that sounds like a grim situation.

I have heard you give evidence in previous years, and some of your warnings on the ever-increasing numbers have been borne out. However, I guess that the numbers do not paint the entire picture. Is the issue simply that the nature of the prisoners has changed over the years? We have heard anecdotal evidence that increases in serious organised crime, which you mentioned, serious sexual offences and serious violent behaviours have led to higher prisoner numbers. Of course, we also have a substantial remand population, many of whom have been there way beyond the statutory limits, because we voted to get rid of those limits in many cases.

Is there proportionality in the system? Are too many people being put in prison for the wrong reasons, or is the issue simply that the nature of crime and its prosecution are changing and therefore people have to be in prison, but we just do not have enough spaces for them?

May I ask about the situation with HMP Greenock? It is an area of local interest for me, but you mentioned it in your opening statement, too, stating that the prison should be bulldozed. It is currently inhabited by a substantial number of prisoners—both those on remand and those being held for longer terms—and has a substantial number of staff. We would have nowhere to put those people if we did bulldoze it, so they are stuck there, presumably, with no plans for replacement. What should happen there?

Right. So we will leave it as is and hope and pray that there is a replacement—

I just want to direct the conversation back to where we started—that is, the situation going forward. As you will be aware, the head of the Scottish Prison Service, Teresa Medhurst, was on television recently, and, referring to prisoners, she was quoted as saying:

“enough is enough ... We cannot take any more.”

Given that we are, as I think it is widely acknowledged, already over capacity, if the trend continues and prisoner numbers rise, the big question is what happens then. I guess that my question, therefore, is this: what do we do when there is simply no more space?

Presumably there are three things that we can do. First, we direct the judiciary not to send people to prison; secondly, we release people who are currently in prison early; and thirdly—and this is something that I suspect is being actively considered—we house the additional influx of people in temporary accommodation. Given your lengthy and wide-ranging experience of prisons, what would be the best option for policy makers?

It seems that we in Scotland have been rather slow to deal with the evolution of criminology in things such as sobriety tagging and GPS technology. Do you understand that an element of society, including some of the victims organisations that often deal with legislators, feels some unease at some of those suggestions? For example, there is unease about emergency legislation that releases people from prison early, because it feels as though justice has not been served. There is also unease about directing the judiciary as to what it should and should not do and who can and cannot go to prison. How should legislators balance that unease among victims and the wider public, who might fear for their safety, with the perilous situation in prisons? Is it at tipping point?