Chamber and committees

Surely it would not be in the interests of the country for someone to take over the airport and just strip out its value.

I have a couple of quick other questions. The framework agreement for Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) Ltd was due to be finalised by December 2023. Has it been finalised?

I have a couple of issues that I would like to explore, permanent secretary. One of them—public service reform, workforce and service redesign—has been somewhat treaded already. The Auditor General’s report states:

“The delivery of public services in their current form is not affordable”.

Do you agree with that statement?

Let me move on to something else: managing financial interventions. The Scottish Government has intervened a number of times over the years, including at Prestwick airport, Ferguson Marine and Burntisland Fabrications. Pretty much all those interventions have had a fairly significant financial consequence for the Scottish Government. What process does the Government follow when engaging with private companies in those circumstances? How does the economic analysis behind it support the decisions that are made?

How well has that worked with Ferguson?

Perhaps you could advise the committee when that happens.

Lastly, the due diligence exercise for the MV Glen Sannox and the MV Glen Rosa was supposedly done in accordance with the requirements of the Scottish public finance manual. What information can you share on previous due diligence reviews for those vessels? What information will be available on the current on-going review?

How much can you provide to the committee?

I will take that in totality as you saying, “Yes, I agree”.

Given that, clearly, there is no affordability, there is an urgency with which to act, because that unaffordability will not go away. You provided some mitigating factors, but the options in the emergency budget review were non-recurring. They provided short-term relief rather than the long-term solutions and savings that we need.

You are time-bound by a period in which you have to make it affordable, otherwise the budget, as you stated, will go over its limit, and legally we cannot do that. Therefore, you must have a timeframe in mind in which to achieve equilibrium between the budget that will be available and the changes that you need to make to balance that budget, otherwise you are in trouble.

It seems that many of the changes that you make are in response to in-year budget needs, as opposed to long-term budget needs. I am not really seeing the long-term, radical structural changes that are needed to create sustainability over a long period. We are seeing responses to whatever money we are allocated in a year and the cuts to that. How do we deal with both the short term and long term, because, sometimes, they do not act well together?