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I am not one to suggest reviews for the sake of reviews but, given that this is such a significant area of expenditure—with the expected growth in it that the convener mentioned—and given the wider UK political context, it would be valuable to discussions to have a robust evidence base that demonstrates that it is not a disincentive to work and that it is potentially supporting economic activity. I expect that that will not be realistic in the timeframe for spending review decisions before the end of the year, but it is something that I would encourage the Government to look at in the not-much-longer term.

I was about to say good morning, but it is no longer the morning. Good afternoon, cabinet secretary. I will go back to the question about the recovery of incorrect payments. You and I have had discussions about the Housing (Scotland) Bill and council tax arrears—a different area but with similar principles. We talked about the tipping point: that is, the point at which it is not viable or good value for money to try to recover money. That can be due to the immediate cost of recovery but also to situations where recovering money would push an individual or a family further into crisis, which is morally wrong but also brings further cost to the state due to its consequences. I would be interested to hear you briefly expand on how that is taken into consideration in the recovery of incorrect social security payments. What is the tipping point at which it is no longer value for money to try to recover those incorrect payments?

A moment ago, you mentioned the review work that found that the Scottish child payment is not acting as a disincentive for parents and carers to enter employment. I might not be aware of it, but is any equivalent work being done on the adult and child disability payments? They are not connected to employment. There is a cost to being disabled whether someone is in work or not, and that is an important principle for those payments, but I am interested to know whether any work is being done on that, particularly because of the committee’s interest in getting more economically inactive people who are able to work and want to work into work. Has any analysis been done of whether those two payments have had an impact on family employment prospects?

Good afternoon. John Mason’s last question was one that I was going to ask. Part of our responsibility here is making sure that we are guarding against groupthink. You mentioned the importance of the SFC being independent. That sometimes requires being pretty robust with the Government. You can take it either way when considering appointing someone who has extensive experience from within Government—you might consider that there is a danger of groupthink if you appoint them, or you might consider that they know where all the bodies are buried and they have all those years of experiencing frustration inside the system. If we assume that it is the latter, do you have any examples of processes that the Government undertakes, particularly in relation to the budget and its fiscal forecasting, about which, after leaving Government, you thought, “My God, why did we do it that way?”, or of processes that you are now excited to have the opportunity to put pressure on the Government to take a different approach on?

I am good, convener. My questions were about the Office of Tax Simplification and the principles of simple systems, which have been well covered.

I will ask Dave Moxham a question but then try to open it up to everybody else.

The STUC has consistently come up with proposals to raise revenue, which is helpful. Very often in pre-budget scrutiny everybody comes to make a pitch for why there needs to be more spending in their area, so it is helpful to hear those suggestions. However, I am interested in whether you believe that the fiscal gap that we have can be addressed entirely through the revenue-raising options that you have set out in your papers recently, bearing in mind that a lot of the more substantive reforms that you are talking about would take three, four or five years to implement—council tax re-evaluation would probably take a minimum of three years, and some of the suggestions would require new primary legislation.

If you do not think that it could all be done through additional revenue raising, are there any particularly obvious areas of savings? It feels like your paper hinted at that in some areas, but it would be useful to draw that out.

To broaden out the question to everybody else, it would be helpful to hear whether you have even just one example of an area in which the Government could make obvious savings on its current spend, such as areas of low-value spend that could be redeployed elsewhere at a reduced cost.

On the MTFS, as an example, you were talking about laying out options. By that do you mean that the Government should set out clearly what its intentions are or that it should provide scenario planning, setting out the options that would be available over the long term to close the fiscal gap, either through spending cuts or tax rises?

There is merit to both approaches. It would be valuable for the Parliament and for the public to know what the current Government’s intentions are, but, particularly in terms of the public economic literacy point that the convener mentioned, it is also important to understand what levers are available to Government, regardless of which lever any Government at any given time pulls on.

I appreciate that, given the point that we are at in the parliamentary timetable. However, the Government needs to be brave enough to accept that the only way that council tax reform will move forward is through a majority, not unanimity. I do not see the prospect for unanimity, and the Government needs to recognise that there is a potential majority for some reform—revaluation at the very minimum—but only if the Government forms part of that majority. There are other MSPs who would support that, and my group is certainly willing to play a part in that majority, but it will not be unanimous.

There are levers that are entirely within devolved competencies. Most obviously, the council tax is the most immediate form of wealth taxation. The single largest form of wealth in Scotland—although it is not the majority of wealth—is residential property wealth. In my view, the failure to reform council tax is the single biggest failure of the devolution era. Taking on board what you said about the other pieces of work that are under way, for example, on land taxation, I am looking to get a sense of whether the Scottish Government has a plan to reduce wealth inequality. Is it looking at all the levers that are available to it and at which could be used to reduce wealth inequality in a way that is good for public finances and good for the economy at large by redistributing more of the money to those who will go out and use it?

With respect, cabinet secretary, I totally accept that premise—I agree with you on the importance of small businesses. My point is that the Government commissioned an independent review that clearly concluded that, if we want to spend £0.25 billion supporting small businesses and the Scottish economy, the small business bonus scheme is not the way to do that. The review was quite unequivocal. It found no evidence of positive economic outcomes, and the scheme has not changed since then. For an unrelated reason, it was tapered somewhat, as a result of which the number of businesses that access it has gone down slightly.

The Government commissioned an independent review, as it should have done, but it did not change anything on the basis of that review, so I am struggling to see a Government that is determined to follow the evidence and get best value for public money. I am not challenging the premise that £0.25 billion should be spent on supporting small businesses, but do you not accept that there is a better way to do it and that the Government needs to take a more robust approach? The Government went through the first half of the process, which was to commission an independent review, but it did not go through the second half of it, which was to change the scheme to make it more effective.