Chamber and committees

What would the perception be of the differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK in that case? It is clear that the new UK Government is not going down that road. I do not think that it has plans to revalue in relation to council tax or to bring in a land tax, for example. How would the change that you suggest impact on the balance in how people perceive Scotland and England in terms of their standard of living?

Sorry—that was the wrong expression.

To be fair, the NHS does a lot. You talked about vaccination, but there are also free eye tests, which avoid problems coming down the line that would cost a lot more.

Alice Telfer has quite a lot to say about reform. I am not going to quote her document just yet, but I might—I have it sitting right in front of me.

No, not replaced. I am talking about when you make the windows wind and watertight, but you retain the same windows. There is a word in my head. They said to me, “You do not want to do that, councillor. You want to get new windows put into 50 houses, and then you can get a nice photograph taken in front of them, rather than repointing them”—that is the word that I was searching for. I said that I wanted them to be repointed.

The point is that it is about how you allocate resources effectively. If you had the money, would spending it on retrofitting be a better use of the overall Scottish budget, if we think of its impact on people’s health and wellbeing, rather than spending it on building new houses, assuming that we had the skilled workers who were trained in number to do it ? I am being devil’s advocate.

I do not have to be a Mystic Meg to know what Euan Lochhead is going to say, but I will let him say it.

You say in your submission:

“Improving productivity is a key gap in the strategy. More emphasis on understanding productivity and why it is decreasing or fluctuating or varying across Scotland, and what can be done to address this is critical.”

How do we do that?

That is a bit too rhetorical. The committee is looking for answers.

The perspective is so huge.

The difference between houses in the Western Isles and the Faroe Islands is incredible—and not to the benefit of the people in the Western Isles.