Chamber and committees

I think so, too. The final question was about the next steps and I think that Jane O’Donnell nailed it there when she talked about wanting the recommendations to be fulfilled.

I thank the witnesses so much for coming in, and thank Angela Leitch, too, for joining us online. The evidence has been very helpful.

I briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

We will now go online. Emma Roddick has a question.

Thank you. That is very helpful. Willie Coffey wants to come in on the same issue.

At the end of the day, however, remuneration is quite an important part of people’s considerations. Thank you for giving evidence this morning, cabinet secretary.

I briefly suspend the meeting to allow the cabinet secretary to leave the room before we move on to our final public agenda item.

The next item on our agenda is consideration of a negative instrument. There is no requirement for the committee to make any recommendations on negative instruments. If there are no comments on the instrument, is the committee agreed that we do not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument?

Members indicated agreement.

We agreed to take the next agenda item in private so I now close the public part of the meeting.

In the previous evidence session, we discussed with the witnesses the timing of things and the working relationship between SLARC, COSLA and the Scottish Government. They started their work at the beginning of April 2023 and said that it was very positive and very engaged, but quite quickly, towards the end of April, things changed. That timing was around the announcement of the council tax freeze. Could you share with us what happened there? The relationship was good, and then they had a sense that there was less engagement from the Scottish Government.

Thank you very much for that outline.

I have an initial question on the timing of the SLARC report. It was published in mid-February, but what we have just heard from our previous panel comprising members of SLARC and COSLA was that it could have been published sooner. It could have been published in December, but the committee was under the impression that it had the time to continue to refine it.

In addition to that piece of the puzzle, we are also interested in the fact that, although the report was published in mid-February, it took the Scottish Government until July to publish its response. Why was that?

Thanks. I think that I need to clear up a little bit of our timescale. We have some different Aprils going on.