Chamber and committees

With that competent response, I shall move on to John Mason, who is to be followed by Liz Smith.

I call Michelle Thomson, whom we would never describe as boring and technical.

That is fair enough. We will put all the really nasty questions to the minister next week.

Are there any further points that you would like to make before we wind up? Are there any points that you feel that we have not covered that you or your colleagues want to get over?

The education and skills portfolio is receiving an additional £54.1 million. The largest element of that is the £29.8 million being provided to the Scottish Qualifications Authority to “support its ongoing activities”. What are these on-going activities that were not previously anticipated?

It would be good to get further detail on that.

The other point is that there is £108.9 million capital spend that has been unallocated. Given the pressures that you have talked about, one would have thought that you would have tried to allocate all of it.

Yes, it is demand led, but there must have been a pretty good idea of what it would be, given the fact that it is not something that has been started from scratch. There is a baseline from the Department for Work and Pensions. There might be people on the fringes who may not qualify under some of the DWP regulations but will qualify for some of the new benefits that the Scottish Government has introduced. It just seems that there was quite a significant underestimation of what was required.

Where do you anticipate that going?

I hope that you are not going through every paragraph.

That is good.

Thank you very much. I have noticed that, over the past eight or nine years, the inflation rate has been 31.5 per cent in the UK, but the standard rate is going up by 23.6 per cent and the net rate by 25 per cent. I realise that you have been effectively mirroring UK rates, but why is the increase lower than the rate of inflation, given that the whole purpose is to try to reduce the amount of landfill? Indeed, over the past decade, there has been a significant reduction in the revenue from the tax despite the costs going up.