Chamber and committees

That is okay. My point is that, if we are looking at every individual care home for every council, the third sector and private sector, that will be a lot of work for somebody.

I will move on. VAT has been mentioned. I do not know whether any of our finance experts can give us the background on that. Earlier, I tried to press the officials on whether they could work round the VAT or whether we are dependent on HMRC and Westminster to make decisions about it. I think that we ended up paying money in relation to the police and fire services, which we did not really want to do. Do you have an angle on VAT? Are you concerned about it?

The final area on which I will touch is what happens if the staff transfer. There was a suggestion in, I think, the CIPFA submission that some staff might not be able to transfer under TUPE.

My final question is about the investment zones that have been announced. My concerns about those kinds of things are that we lose tax, for one, and that existing jobs move from one area to another just to get those kinds of benefits. Can you say anything about the investment zones? Do we know anything about them?

Is it your understanding that the UK Government had forecasts that warned about those things, but ignored them and went ahead anyway, or did it not even look at the forecasts?

If housing associations are to build less, that will be a saving on the capital budget for the Government, presumably, because they will not be wanting the grants that they could have had?

Talking of capital expenditure, we had evidence from South Lanarkshire Council saying that, although we say that inflation is 10 per cent, 11 per cent or whatever, in some capital projects it was facing 30 per cent inflation. An example was in building a bridge, primarily because of the shortage of steel, which I believe comes from Ukraine. Do you recognise that kind of inflation figure and that it is different in different sectors?

I have a few questions. There was a UK budget—I consider it to have been a budget, whatever it was called—without OBR forecasts. What is the risk of not having forecasts tied into the budget?

Following on from that, a number of housing associations were in touch with me over the weekend, especially in relation to this week’s Cost of Living (Tenant Protection) (Scotland) Bill. However, before the legislation came up, they had already looked at cutting back capital expenditure in relation to new houses, because even before the rent freeze proposal, they were only planning a rent increase of 5 or 6 per cent.

One association told me that it is stopping all new builds. It will only complete what it is already doing and do maintenance. It was borrowing £40 million for new builds and it has now cancelled that with the bank. Will that have an impact on our capital expenditure, because that is not so much about us borrowing, it is about trying to help other people?

It strikes me as totally irresponsible to do a budget without forecasts. Is that something that the Scottish Government would be allowed to do or would even consider doing?