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I will come back to that question later. I am just interested in how the register might work in practice, particularly at the lower end. You said that the approach could be cheaper and more efficient and that finance could be accessed immediately, but how do you envisage that it would work in practice? The process of registering a house or other legal documents in Scotland could end up being quite clunky and costly.

Could the bill state that ordinary household goods or essential household goods are excluded from the bill’s provisions? Is there a negative aspect to doing that?

Let me push you a little, as you are the experts who came up with the proposed changes that you say are needed. At what level should they kick in? Without a figure or type of property in mind, it is difficult to get one’s head round the issue. This has come up in relation to consumers: is the figure designed to cover household goods?

A house is generally of higher value, which balances out the risk.

That is helpful. There have also been some concerns about privacy. What thoughts do you have on that?

I am sure that they will be.

I want to move on to some of the consumer issues. We have mentioned a few times that the impact will only be on high-value items. Before going into the consumer stuff, I am interested in the minimum sums that will be involved.

The issue has been picked up quite a lot outside the Parliament, and I know that you have made representations on it. I just want to understand where the £1,000 figure came from, what you think is the right threshold and why you went for a fixed-sum model rather than one that identifies types of moveable good to which the bill should apply.

I guess that the horse has bolted a bit in that there is now a lot of interest in that aspect of the bill. Would there be any negative aspects to putting something on that in the bill? At the moment, through secondary instruments, it is possible to exclude items from becoming covered by the bill, but is there any merit in putting that in plain English in the bill?

I have no interests to declare, convener.

Yes.

That is why I referred to the lower end. There is obviously a cost in recovery, and effort is involved in doing that—