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Minister, I am interested to have a bit of clarity on which of the budget revisions are presumed to be one-offs due to underspends or unforeseen circumstances and which have arisen, as in the NZET portfolio, because of lower than expected demand. Which areas of lower demand are expected to reoccur such that the new figure after the budget revision will be baselined into next year’s budget instead of a return to the baseline figure that was in the budget at the start of this year?

I recognise that the NZET reductions are not in your portfolio so you might not be able to go into the specifics. However, given that they are some of the more substantial reductions, what effect does the Government expect them to have on hitting our NZET targets for emission reductions, nature restoration and so on and, separately, our child poverty targets as they relate to home energy efficiency?

I have a question that relates to the point about whether the savings will recur—that is, whether the baseline now includes them, rather than being the figure that we started the financial year with. Where the savings are being made in order to deliver what is required for public sector pay, we can presume that public sector pay increases are a recurring cost and not a one-off for this year. We will therefore need to find that money from somewhere in future years, although it will not necessarily need to come from the specific areas that it came from this year.

What instructions have been issued to ministers and civil service directors about evaluating the impact of those savings and whether it will be sensible to baseline the new figure in from next year because the potential negative consequences are manageable in some way?

My first question is primarily for Tony Buchanan, but I would be interested in hearing the other panellists’ thoughts on it. Do you feel from the bill and its financial memorandum that the costs of the potential transfer of children’s services have been made clear?

Just for clarity, do you believe that further costings should come before Parliament completes this particular legislative process, or could they come through the independent review?

Yes, that is totally fine.

The level of integration between children’s services and other services has been mentioned quite a bit already, particularly in answer to Willie Rennie’s line of questioning and, in the COSLA submission, particularly in relation to early years childcare provision. If the decision is made to transfer children’s services to the new national care service, how easy will it be to disaggregate that discrete spending from the wider spending that local authorities put into services that are for children in some way, rather than the specific children’s social services that we are talking about?

You have already mentioned that this is a framework bill, and that the decision whether to transfer children’s services will be taken not as part of this legislative process but later on. Is there any information that has not been provided but which you think is critical before Parliament further considers the bill, or can we wait for the future decision specifically on children’s services?

My first question is on sequencing. I entirely understand the point that you made in your opening remarks about what Parliament’s standing orders require you to lay out in a financial memorandum, and I appreciate your comment about not pre-empting the result of co-design processes. However, for me, that raises the obvious—if perhaps daft laddie—question of why we did not go through the co-design process before we reached this stage of the parliamentary process.

I appreciate that, as you have said and as we would all expect, you are engaged in discussions with the UK Government on achieving VAT neutrality, but surely, until those discussions reach what we hope is a positive conclusion, the default position is that there will be VAT liability. If that is the status quo at present, until an agreement is reached, I am not sure why it has not been covered in the financial memorandum.