Chamber and committees

Okay. I will let you off at that.

How do you approach the assessment of potential investments by the Scottish Government? Are there key criteria that you apply? Are there policy priorities that you wish to achieve?

When will that investment be made? I presume that you have been in discussions for eight years.

There is a contractual arrangement with the Scottish Government that the investment will be made. Is there a date by which it must happen?

Yes, but if you are moving to electric vehicles, they still need wheels.

Was GFG’s undertaking to invest contractual?

However, the fact that the agencies have had a budget decrease will restrict their activities. By all means, they should prioritise, but I would have hoped that they would have prioritised exactly what they were doing, even before the decrease. That is bound to have some impact on the different areas that they are working in. How do they deal with that? It is all right to say that they should prioritise, but how do they do that?

I mentioned SNIB a few minutes ago. I am interested in looking at its funding, much of which came in the form of financial transactions. Currently, the Scottish Government does not anticipate receiving any further financial transactions from the UK Government. Do you expect that more will be available in the future? If not, how do you intend to meet the pledge to capitalise the bank with £2 billion over 10 years?

Do you have an example of Scottish Government support going through SNIB?

My concern is about where the funding will come from as financial transactions vanish. Budgets are extremely tight and I cannot imagine that they will be any easier next year. How do we keep the momentum going with SNIB? How do we keep the bank’s good work properly funded so that it can deliver?

Good morning, cabinet secretary. I would like to pick up on a point that you raised earlier during the discussion on income tax, which is one of the few tax-raising levers that the Scottish Government has under its control. I want a point to be clarified. I presume that much of the focus on income tax would go away if we had control over, for example, national insurance, corporate tax and VAT. There would be more levers to consider and income tax would be less of a focus, because there would be a broad spectrum of taxes that could be manipulated. Would that be correct?