Chamber and committees

That is helpful. My use of the word “audit” includes a lot of ways of auditing a figure in accounts, for example, but it would certainly not always include cross-examining somebody.

Unless either of the other two witnesses wants to come in, I am happy to leave it there. I think that Ms Young does.

Could the circumstances not have changed after the appeal?

That is helpful. I think that we will explore that further in the future.

Going back to some of the stuff that has already been touched on, I was interested in a phrase that Scott Mackay used earlier:

“based on discussions with the Treasury”.

I had imagined—obviously wrongly—that in England they spend £100 million on the national health service and then we get £8 million or so as a consequential. I had imagined that it is all factual, the figures are there and it is automatic. The phrase

“based on discussions with the Treasury”

suggests that it is a lot more subjective than that. Is that because the Treasury itself does not know what the spending in England is? For example, it does not know whether the NHS will overspend or underspend a bit, and that in itself will impact on us. Is that part of the problem?

I fully agree with that.

I will move on to some specifics. I am going through the guide, so hopefully the paragraphs match.

It sounds as though it is not a lack of willingness on their part, but also that they are a wee bit in the dark. Sometimes we get announcements at Westminster that the UK Government will spend £100 million on X—it came up quite a lot during the Covid pandemic—but we do not know whether that is new money, in which case we get a share, or it is a reallocation of existing money. Is that part of the problem as well?

Not every paragraph.

That is helpful in allowing us to understand the position that you are in as well.

When we get to the end of the year and there is an overspend or an underspend, I look at it to see whether it is around 1 per cent. If it is around 1 per cent, I have to say that I think that that is very good. I know that the numbers are very big and that 1 per cent is quite a big number, but I think that for most of us, in our own personal spending, we would never get it within 1 per cent. Most businesses would not get within 1 per cent. That is just by way of comment.

Mr Doak, you are not all that enthusiastic about the tax, anyway, so I presume that you do not want anything to be added.

Mr Sharma, COSLA argues that there should be certain exemptions for local authorities.