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I appreciate that. My question is to the cabinet secretary. Would it not strengthen the bill if we were to specify that the committees were directly accountable to the board rather than to the organisation as a whole? If we do not specify that in legislation, it is an operational decision for the organisation to make. I would not trust our current qualifications agency to make such a decision. We all share the hope that the new body will have a better culture and will not make decisions similar to the SQA’s. If we put it into primary legislation that the two committees are directly accountable to the board, would that not strengthen accountability?

Thanks very much. I will return to the PFG, which the cabinet secretary presented a pretty rosy picture of. You argued that the inclusion is implicit rather than explicit, and you seemed to indicate that that was a deliberate choice. You made the point that the First Minister’s four priorities match the outcomes in the NPF and of course they do, because they are all very agreeable. The only reason why somebody would disagree is if they were a climate science denier; beyond that, it is all agreeable stuff.

However, it was a significant omission that the single most important document in the Government did not refer to the framework that the Government uses to measure whether it is building the kind of society that it wants. Would it not be easier to come here and say that that was an oversight and that it will not happen again?

I have a couple of questions about the national performance framework and local government finances, but before I get to them, I would like to follow up on Michelle Thomson’s lines of questioning, which I found interesting.

First, on air passenger duty—or air departure tax—and the subsidy control issue with regard to lifeline routes, are you able to confirm whether the new UK Government agrees, at least in principle, on the need to resolve that? We need to deliver on something that we all agreed to devolve 10 years ago, but we also need to protect support for the lifeline routes.

I will move on to the other areas that I had planned to ask about. First, on local government finance reform, the joint working group with COSLA has not met since the Government changed back in April. Should we read much into that? Why has it been so long since that group last met?

I absolutely agree on that. On exactly that point, what is your expectation for outcomes by the end of this parliamentary session on local government finance reform? Is there an ambition to have made a decision by March or April 2026 on council tax revaluation, a replacement system or additional new powers that are entirely separate? What is your expectation of where we will be? How much will have changed by then, or how much will at least be in motion by then, recognising that some of the reforms would be multiyear and quite complex ones?

On exactly that, far from being perfect, council tax has not been in date in my lifetime, and I am now 30. Would you like to see revaluation in the current parliamentary session?

I totally agree on the need for cross-party consensus. The working group that is leading that activity has only representatives of your party on it, because it is a Scottish Government working group. What is the space in which that cross-party consensus can emerge?

Good morning, cabinet secretary. The updates to the framework are perfectly reasonable, but I share the scepticism that was inherent in the convener’s opening question about the extent to which making the changes will actually change the outcomes that we are all looking for. Last week, when I visited the University of the West of Scotland, before I had even asked, the people there were able to evidence how they based their strategic plan around the national performance framework and how they align with it. Those people were better able to evidence that than the Scottish Government is.

I am struggling to decide whether there is a challenge for the Government because it cannot evidence the work that it is doing, or whether the situation is actually worse than that and the NPF is simply not being taken into account. Do you understand that, if the Scottish Government cannot evidence its alignment with its performance framework, when other organisations have taken up that challenge, that presents quite profound questions?

That would be useful. Thank you very much.

Can you also confirm the Government’s position with regard to the value for money from bonds? I recognise that a lot of work is being done to assess that, but concerns have been raised that they are unlikely to be of greater value than regular borrowing, particularly given that the overall limit is the same. Would the Government go ahead with issuing bonds, even if they were found to be of less value than the regular borrowing options that are currently available?

If, at that point, it became clear that prevailing market conditions meant that a bond would be of less value and that we would end up paying more back in the long run than we would through regular borrowing through the Public Works Loan Board, I presume that the Government would not go ahead with issuing a bond.