Chamber and committees

Has the experience been that any material has gone missing between the point of production and the point of exploitation? I am an accountant, so it seems neater to me to use the point of production, because you know where the quarry is. When something leaves the quarry, that is easy to measure, but goodness knows where it might go for exploitation.

Do you have views on that, Mr Neill?

Thank you. I will leave it at that.

Do they have complete autonomy?

Costs could go up further or they could go down a bit—we just do not know.

Mr Mackay has just told us that the financial transactions money mainly goes to SNIB and housing. Does that there will be a bit more leeway next year, or is that already built in to the budget?

That is helpful. That is something that we will return to.

Will the timescale for that be well after the year-end?

I will stay within the 22 minutes that you took.

Paragraph 18 talks about some overspends or additional funding for the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration, the Scottish Social Services Council and Children’s Hearings Scotland. I do not know whether that is just strictly because of pay increases or whether there are other factors. As I think you know, the committee has been concerned about the number of commissions, commissioners and semi-separate organisations and I would be concerned if the costs of those were slipping.

So you are not arguing that a particular product should be taken out or anything like that.