Official Report 490KB pdf
Good morning, and welcome to the 10th meeting in 2026 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. I remind everyone to switch off, or put to silent, their mobile phones and any electronic devices.
Agenda item 1 is declaration of interests. In accordance with section 3 of the code of conduct, I invite Angela Ross MSP and Joe Fagan MSP to declare any interests that are relevant to the remit of the committee.
I declare an interest in that I own a business. I have run it for eight years, but I no longer take any money from it. The business included an artificial intelligence component; we built a large language model that included a kind of closed AI system. Those are, I think, the key things that I should cover.
As my entry in the register of interests shows, I am a councillor in South Lanarkshire and will be so until May next year.
Thank you, and I welcome both of you to the committee.
I also want to take this opportunity on behalf of the committee to thank Michael Marra MSP and Kim Schmulian MSP for their valued contribution to the committee’s work.
Finally, before we move to the next item of business, I want to make everyone in the room aware that I will be suspending the meeting for the two-minute silence at 11 am to mark remembrance day.