Chamber and committees

As long as they do not contradict the general principles of the bill, I do not see why there would be an issue about such amendments. Their admissibility would obviously be for the Presiding Officer to decide.

As I was going to say before I remembered that John Mason wanted to come in with that question—which I did know of—are there any other issues that the witnesses wish to highlight that we have not touched on, but which you feel should be discussed on the record?

Liz Smith and I, and a number of other colleagues, have raised that issue. That is certainly something to take on board.

Do witnesses want to highlight any other points that have not come up so far?

Okay. The other issue is compliance. It was music to our ears to hear that compliance is to be addressed. The committee has tried to grapple with the scale of the challenge in that regard. As I mentioned to the earlier panel of witnesses, it is not as though Scotland is a huge country where you can hide thousands of quarries. I am thinking of the likes of Canada or Russia—or Kazakhstan, for God’s sake. I will not simply rhyme off lots of big countries. Scotland is a country of 30,000 square miles, so it should be pretty easy to know where all the quarries are and who is paying tax and who is not. Do you have any idea of the scale of the challenge in addressing the compliance of quarries and what is going to be done to ensure that they pay their whack?

—so surely that would be the first point of contact. You could ask authorities, “What quarries do you have in your area?”, and you could then check whether they were registered and paying taxes or whether they were not registered, in which case action could be taken. It is not as though you would have to fly a drone, inch by inch, all over Scotland in order to be able to locate them and check them against a list. Surely everyone must know whether there is a quarry at the end of their street.

Do you have any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that, for example, if the tax went down by £1, Scotland would flood England with aggregates because people would be saving £1 a tonne? If it went up to £3, would the opposite happen and Scotland would be flooded with aggregates, or would there be very little difference? Of course, if it went up and people had to pay an extra pound, that might encourage more people to invest in recycling facilities, and it would bring in more revenue for the Scottish Government. Where is the elasticity in that?

No—it is not a question of taking a view on a policy. Surely Revenue Scotland has an idea of what the impact would be of having a different level of tax. Given that you will be collecting the revenue, surely you would be able to explain to the minister what impact you expect raising or lowering the tax to have on the revenue that comes in.

I note that the financial memorandum includes £25,000 specifically for the Scottish Fiscal Commission to do that forecast, so I appreciate what you say.

In section 5.4 of your submission, you talk about the Scottish Parliament enacting

“a legislative scheme with ‘teeth’ to challenge noncompliance.”

What kind of teeth would you like to see in the bill that might not be in it at the moment?

On the part 2 provisions, you will be aware of the concerns that were raised by our previous panel of witnesses—one of whom is still in the room, at the back—from the Chartered Institute of Taxation, the Law Society of Scotland and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. They raised concerns about the lack of safeguards for taxpayers in such a situation. If you fail to pay a tax on aggregates, it may impact on other taxes that you pay. What is your view on that?

Yes—the set-off provisions.

I am not looking for a cushion; I am asking to what degree the figures are accurate. That is what we are trying to find out. As you are probably well aware, we have had financial memorandums that have changed by hundreds of millions of pounds during a year. That is why I am trying to pin you down a wee bit and get you to say that, although it might go up or down by 5 per cent, you are absolutely confident that those are the figures, rather than that the figures could be completely different this time next year.