Chamber and committees

Yes!

Members indicated agreement.

You suggested that you might be able to give councils a bit more flexibility. Another example that councils gave me was that some money is ring fenced for the health and social care partnerships, but any savings that can be made between the health board and the partnership cannot be moved out to help another part of the council that is under more pressure. Would you consider flexibility in relation to that kind of thing?

This is not my area of expertise. However, councils tell me that all local authorities agreed that there could be an increase in fixed-penalty charges but that the issue seems to have got stuck somewhere.

I do not want to go over too much old ground, although it is a temptation.

Recently, the International Monetary Fund said that the UK economy, unlike that of most other competitors, will not grow this year. Last week, interest rates went up to 4 per cent. Will either of those issues have an impact on next year’s budget?

Okay. Another suggestion that has been made to me is about teacher numbers. Pupil to teacher ratios vary around the country’s councils. I do not think that any of us wants to reduce the number of teachers, but it was suggested that Glasgow and some other councils have an above-average ratio at the moment and could perhaps have flexibility to at least move to the national average instead of having that extra investment.

Okay, thank you.

In our dialogue with council colleagues we have heard that councils are struggling to balance their budgets, just as we are struggling to balance ours. Everyone realises that everyone else is in a difficult place. Councils have spoken to me about having more freedom to raise revenue. One example that they gave relates to private landlord registration fees and another is about being allowed to increase penalty charge notices for parking, which could improve the illegal parking situation and provide a bit of extra money. It has been mentioned that that could raise £3 million for Glasgow City Council. Is there any space for that kind of thing?

You replied on 20 December to the letter that the committee wrote to you. Our first question was about Covid recovery and the cost crisis—specifically, whether inflationary pressures and the cost crisis are negatively impacting on the Covid recovery strategy. We got a page-long answer, but I was still not very clear about the matter having read it. Can I press you on that point? Are inflationary pressures impacting on the Covid recovery strategy?

Deputy First Minister, you answered the convener’s question about how vaccinations are going. The figures for the over-65s and older adults in care homes seem very good, but the figures for care workers do not seem quite as strong—I think that you said that the uptake rate was around or below 50 per cent. For specified front-line social care workers, I think that the figure is 39.8 per cent, which seems quite low. Do you have an explanation for that?

Absolutely—I completely agree with that. Has anything specific in the Covid recovery strategy suffered because of all that?

You have said that the way that we use the term “spending review” is a bit different from the way that other countries use it, so I wonder whether we are comparing like with like. From what I can see, for us, a spending review involves looking at the big picture and the overall budget over a few years, whereas, in one of the examples that was given, Germany had a spending review of one part of transport. That seemed to involve looking at one much more specific area in a lot more detail and, as you said, seeing whether the spending was useful. Are we comparing like with like when we use the term “spending review”?