Chamber and committees

I am still interested in how we achieve the policy coherence aspects of that. Is each cabinet secretary responsible for ensuring that the books balance in their portfolio in their own way, or has a set of instructions been issued on the basis of the First Minister’s prospectus from April?

In the education portfolio, for example, I cannot remember off the top of my head whether there are conditions attached to the pupil equity fund. A lot of pupil equity funding is used by schools to pay for third and private sector organisations. That has clear additional benefit, but I do not know whether we attach, for example, a real living wage condition to the use of the PEF, which would align with the poverty objective in the prospectus. Is the overarching set of objectives being used to give instruction to each directorate and cabinet secretary to ensure that we are achieving policy coherence and value for money?

One would have expected a significant initial spike in the child disability payment as we transition away from what was a relatively hostile system under the Department for Work and Pensions towards the deliberately more generous system under Social Security Scotland but, according to the same table, the child disability payment is projected to continue to rise quite significantly. I understand why that would be the case for the adult disability payment, given that our adult population is becoming more ill as a result of a number of factors, but is the same driver behind the situation with the child disability payment or is it something else?

I apologise if I missed this in your answers to Michael Marra’s questions about digital enhancement, but are you able to quantify the financial savings from upgrades? For example, do you know how much the bed management and patient tracking system that you mentioned has saved you? I am interested to know how much you would expect to save from such an upgrade—not that it is all about the money, obviously.

Your submission mentions opportunities for collaboration, particularly with local authorities when it comes to property and estates. Do you have any examples of where such collaboration has worked well to increase efficiency?

How much of the reduction in the number of eligible children is a result of the reduction in the overall population versus the relative socioeconomic situation with regard to children? I think that, over the five-year period covered in the paper, we are looking at a drop of something like 25,000 children in the primary school roll.

I have a couple of questions about the calculations on social security spend in figure 5.3, which is on page 81 of your report. I would appreciate a little bit more information.

Part of the theory of the Scottish child payment is that, if we give families more income, we create the stability for them to find themselves in a better financial situation in which they do not require the payment. The calculations that you have in the figure show a dip over the next couple of years but that then slowing down over the last couple of years in the cycle. Will you explain a little bit about that tailing off in the decrease?

Yes.

Is the west, then, going to become that drag? Are we going to see the gap between earnings in the east and west continue to grow? Concerns have been expressed about that—I have certainly heard them locally—off the back of the announcement of free ports being established in the north and the east of the country, but not in the west. I must stress that I am not in favour of free ports, but we are already seeing a fall not just in the population but in average income growth on the west coast compared with the rest of the country.

As I was bringing up the issue of free ports, another question occurred to me. Have you made any projections on the basis of their expected economic impact? I realise that we are still very early in the process.

Thanks very much. That is all from me, convener.