Chamber and committees

That was helpful, Dr Scott. This is not the first tax group that has run into difficulties over several years of the Scottish Parliament while looking at how well we can get the necessary revenue in from the tax that we place on businesses and the public.

I want to finish on modelling, which the Deputy First Minister has mentioned several times, because the modelling matters. It is about the facts. I think that Michelle Thomson raised the issue—maybe it was the convener—that, when we come to the budget debates, we will obviously have different political views but the facts matter. At the moment, we are in a difficult place on the committee because some of the facts seem to be nebulous and up in the air. I will quote for you what Sandy Begbie told us last week at committee. He said that we desperately need young graduates and professionals:

“That is exactly the type of population that we want to attract to Scotland, and we should do everything that we can to attract them. To be blunt, free university and prescriptions are all great, but they do not really mean anything or carry any value for that population.”—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 26 September 2023; c 34-35.]

That is an interesting reflection about a cohort of people whom we are trying desperately to attract into Scotland and about some of the advantages that we might like to talk about not meaning so much to them. I am interested in how you can model behavioural changes in the different groups in Scottish society and, I hope, the ones that we can attract in the future. We need that data if we are to be successful in that.

Minister, how long do you envisage the co-design process taking? How many more months will we be doing it?

Minister, you have talked about co-design, which your predecessor, Kevin Stewart, was also very keen on when he attended the committee on 8 November last year. The principles of co-design sound sensible, but the trouble is that it is an on-going process, as you have reiterated this morning. Surely, if it is on-going, that makes it very difficult to forecast in detail what the costs will be at the end of the process.

Thank you very much for the evidence that you have provided so far, which has been very helpful to us. When, as the Deputy First Minister of the time, John Swinney was at this committee for the previous budget scrutiny, he flagged up three critical issues. One of them was entrepreneurship, and the second was about regional support in business. The third one, to which he ascribed considerable importance, was about the numbers of people who are economically inactive—people who have come out of the workforce in Scotland—and how that was causing a lot of difficulties. Perhaps it is people who, since Covid, have decided that they no longer want to work full time, so they are working only part time. Some of them have come out altogether, taking early retirement. He was very concerned about how we can attract more of those people back into work. Could you offer us some suggestions as to what you would like to see in the approach to the economically inactive? There is obviously a waste of talent from not having those people in work.

That was helpful.

How do you propose to put in front of the committee what the true costs will be? We all accept that no financial memorandum can be 100 per cent accurate, but it will have to be much more accurate than the one with which we were presented before. I do not see how we will be able to get to that situation when engagement is on-going that might produce many more suggestions about how to improve the bill. Do you accept that, as a result of that, it is difficult to get to the cost structures that the committee needs to scrutinise?

Thank you.

My final point is on one of the difficulties that we had this time last year, which was the strong criticism that we heard of the Scottish Government’s proposals from people on the front line of delivery, including some in council authorities and care services. There was a bit of a contrast between what they were saying and what those who had experienced care were saying. Have you consulted in great depth those who were critical of the proposals, because they felt that the costs had not been fully set out and, indeed, told you that the bill for the whole thing was going to be much more than you had predicted? Do we have some statistics for the figures that COSLA and local government said were a bit of a concern? Has that arithmetic been done?

Do any of you think that there is any sign that there is slight movement, and that economically inactive people are starting to look for jobs, or is it just a very difficult landscape?

It is difficult. I also want to ask about high streets, and perhaps Rachel Cook is best placed to answer this question. Obviously, it is of great concern to many of us who represent rural communities that high streets in our smaller towns are decimated. What else can we do to try to reverse that trend?

That is important, but it is even more important for the costs that go along with those changes to instil confidence in people that the bill will be deliverable. That is the area that concerns the committee, and I suggest that there is still an awful lot of work to be done before the next financial memorandum comes back to the committee to give us a much better idea of the costs, given the divergence of opinion.