Chamber and committees

I should really call you all by your first names, because we have two Robertsons on the panel, which makes things a little confusing.

David Robertson, you heard at the beginning that we had a trip to Estonia last week to look at what it is doing in relation to digitisation of public services. Incidentally, Estonia is doing that because, after independence from the Soviet Union, it had a budget of only €130 million for the whole country. It couldnae afford to set up offices in rural towns and had to do everything somehow differently, and it ended up doing it digitally. Is Scottish Borders Council looking at that sort of service delivery?

Another area that you have highlighted frequently throughout the submission is preventative spend and early intervention. You say that there needs to be

“a refocus on prevention and early intervention spend”

and that

“Now more than ever, there needs to be investment in ‘upstream’ services that help to prevent problems rather than focusing spend on responding to them.”

I think that we would agree with that. I have mentioned to other witnesses and panels that in the 2011 to 2016 parliamentary session John Swinney allocated £500 million to try to embed preventative spend, but the difficulty was that there was no corresponding disinvestment in programmes that were—shall we say?—providing less value for money. What is COSLA doing to try to ensure that we move down the road of disinvesting in areas that provide less value for money in order to focus on the areas that provide the most?

I thank all our guests for their contributions. We will conclude our national outcomes scrutiny with evidence from the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Gaelic next week.

Flexibility is a really important issue. David Robertson, how is ring fencing impacting on the Borders?

The political perspective is that the Scottish Government gets blamed if teacher numbers fall. If it gives local authorities flexibility to change teacher numbers and there are, therefore, fewer teachers, the Government gets the blame, rather than the local authority that takes the decision, despite local government having its own level of democratic accountability.

You are smiling, Mr Robertson, because you know that that is exactly the case.

Jamie Robertson, because of prudential borrowing, local authorities have greater flexibility in borrowing than the Scottish Government does. There has been a significant reduction in borrowing from £1.23 billion in 2019-20 to £690 million in 2021-22, with a slight up-kick to £820 million in 2022-23. The figures for last year are not in your submission, but it says:

“Councils have found themselves in a position of having to place greater reliance on borrowing as a source of capital funding to sustain and invest in their infrastructure to meet the needs and priorities of communities and boost local economies.”

Clearly, there is greater reliance on borrowing. Do you feel that that will continue to be the case and that borrowing will have to play a bigger role, or will there be a reduction in borrowing across local authorities, as there has been in the past three or four years?

We will not bother having a structure, then. On you go.

I put that question to Allan Faulds, who has been very patient, to be followed by Michael Kellet.

The committee will be taking evidence on that immediately after this session, Lewis.