Chamber and committees

Colleagues around the table will want to dig into some of the figures. I will just touch on a couple of them, especially given the fact that I overdid it in the last session. [Laughter]. I will give folk a chance to claw back some time.

Under rural affairs, land reform and islands, I will not go into detail other than to mention that you have said the portfolios were reduced by £31 million as part of the budget revision, and you gave some context to that. You also talked about services for agricultural support being reprofiled in future years with no loss of funding. Why does that change have to take place in the first place?

Hold on a second. If you are taking actions, the costings have to be realistic. The point is that local government is saying that the costings are not realistic. Therefore, even if councils agree to take things forward to the nth degree, which is what they want to do—nobody wants to have contaminated waste, and everyone wants to maximise recycling: that is a given across the Parliament—that has to be funded.

Each local authority is different. For example, Dundee City Council talked about half of its citizens living in flatted properties. Enforcement and behavioural change are extremely difficult, and the cost of educating people will be extremely difficult to meet if we are going to get the long-term behavioural change that we want. Councils have said that they are putting huge amounts of money in, but they are still unable to reach recycling targets and they need additional resources.

We know that the bill is a framework bill, that there will be co-design and that there is going to be secondary legislation, but will the Government make a commitment up front, through the Verity house agreement or whatever, that, if its partners in local government go down that road, they will be funded? Local authorities will be quite reluctant to go down that road if they think that they will not be resourced to do so. It is one thing to say that it is up to them to do this or that, but they cannae do it if they havenae got the money. That is why they want a commitment from the Government that they will be funded.

Local authorities want realistic funding, not an airy-fairy promise that they will collect 100 per cent of fines when that has never happened and never will happen. It has to be realistic, and our concern is whether the financial memorandum is realistic. The evidence that we have suggests that there are elements of it that are not realistic, such as the examples that I have already given.

We will want to ask further questions specifically on that in the weeks and months ahead, so that we can have it clarified in our heads and, indeed, so that the wider Parliament can get a grip on what it means. That will be an important process for us.

This is my last question before I open up the discussion to colleagues—I said that I would try not to hog the session, as I sometimes do inadvertently. Resource borrowing costs and capital borrowing costs are down. Given that interest rates have gone up, why do we have reduced capital borrowing costs? One of the things that came out of our sustainability report was that the UK Government will cut our capital allocation over the next five years by 16 per cent in real terms. One would have thought that the Scottish Government would seek to maximise its capital spend wherever possible, given the need to invest in physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure et cetera. Why has that happened, and what is the reasoning behind the Government’s move on capital?

Excuse me, but everyone seems to be whispering all of a sudden. I do not know whether I am the only one who notices it, but it is difficult for everyone to hear. Minister and Niall, will you speak up a wee bit?

John Mason raised the issue of different councils using different coloured bins, which means that when people move from one local authority area to another, they do not realise that the bins have changed, and all the rest of it. You said that standardisation in that respect might emerge from the co-design process. Is Government’s role not to provide some leadership by saying, “This is what we want recycling in Scotland to look like in five years’ time,” and trying to steer local authorities in a certain direction? Co-design sounds great, but it also sounds kind of woolly. It is as if we are asking, “Where are we gonnae end up?” Therefore, should the Government not provide leadership on this?

Such framework bills appear to me to be something of a cop-out, frankly. We have seen that with the financial memorandum for the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. People want to know that, when they elect a Government on a manifesto, it will work to deliver that manifesto. It is all very cuddly having everyone in the big tent and all that, but it seems to me that it takes a lot longer to get anywhere and you do not even know at the start of the process where you are going to end up.

Thank you for that clarification.

I will open up the session to colleagues. The first to ask a question will be the returning stalwart, Daniel Johnson, and he will be followed by John Mason.

A stalwart indeed. We want you back.

The saving from cups is estimated to be about £453,000 a year. Compared with the overall costs of this, that is a relatively modest figure.

I did not know that Forestry and Land Scotland and Creative Scotland, for example, were sitting on reserves before that was announced by the cabinet secretary in the chamber. It seems a bit odd, to me.

I referred to paragraph 48, but my question was not about the detail of the paragraph. We have been talking about co-design and co-operation with local authorities, and I am concerned that they seem not to have been aware of where the figures came from. Clearly, there is a communication issue with regard to that.

My other question on numbers is about the £70 million that is being allocated for the recycling improvement fund. Ross Greer referred to the fund as well. We were told that, of the £70 million, £53 million is being allocated to 17 local authorities, which means that 15 local authorities have not received an allocation from the remaining £17 million. In response to John Mason, you said that £21 million has been allocated to Glasgow, which is 30 per cent of the fund going to an urban area that has roughly 10 per cent of Scotland’s population. If those figures are right, it means that only £32 million has gone to 16 local authorities, which seems quite disproportionate. Is there a reason for that?