Chamber and committees

Thank you for your patience, Mr Mason.

John McKenzie and Mike Corbett have asked to make a contribution. I will go to John first.

You have put that into the Official Report—thank you.

We move on to questions from Katy Clark.

Do you have any follow-up questions from that, Katy?

I will not push that any further. We heard it last week, so we just wanted to float it this week to see whether there was any buy-in from witnesses.

That gives me the opportunity to put on the record the important point that the current timescale for the last agency agreement between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Scottish Government in relation to the payments is the financial year 2025-26. That gives us, in this place, a timescale, whether we proceed through this bill or through Scottish Government legislation. Your point is well made.

We will move on to the financial aspects, unless anyone else wants to come in.

I see that Anna Ritchie Allan wants to come in.

I think that there was a recent event that we were hoping to attend to learn more. I had more questions that I wanted to ask, in fact, but I did not want to take the session in that direction. Thank you, Mr Higgins, for drawing that to our attention.

As there are no further comments before I close this evidence session, it just remains for me to thank all four of you for your evidence this morning, and, indeed, our first panel, who gave evidence earlier.

That concludes our public business for today.

May I clarify, Norman? That is because IIAC is not allowed to give advice to the Scottish Government. It is not that it could not do so.

In last week’s evidence session, we heard that some of the experts who might be keen to sit on SEIAC might already sit on IIAC, and the committee has asked for information as to whether there would be a bar to their being able to sit on both. Is that your understanding as well?