Chamber and committees

Mr Arnold, you might want to comment on that matter, but I will also ask you another question. Does the way that people have come here make any difference to their experience? In other words, is the experience of those who have been granted refugee status after seeking asylum different from that of people who came here through the UK resettlement scheme or, as you mentioned, the Afghan relocation scheme?

If we cannot do anything this year, would the Government think about going a bit further with the Scottish child payment in another year? Or, if you had extra money, would you prefer to move forward with some other benefit?

It is very unfortunate that Katy Clark came in and asked Jeremy Balfour’s question. She was late to the meeting and took over a question that had already been allocated to another member. I accept, however, that that is your prerogative, convener.

My question is about the Scottish child payment. There have been quite a lot of requests for it to increase by more than inflation. I note what you have said already, cabinet secretary—and £6.3 billion is obviously a huge amount of money and a huge increase for the whole social security budget—but did you take into account those requests for a higher increase for the Scottish child payment?

That is what I feared. It seems that it does not matter what we do. As long as we have income tax and national insurance as they are in the UK, we have a real problem.

Moving on to another tax, you have commented on council tax reform and made the point that, as we know, there is no agreement or consensus on what should replace it. Some of us are getting a little bit frustrated. After all, we need to do something, but clearly nothing that we do will have 100 per cent support. Is the Government committed to making some kind of change fairly soon?

As we have already covered quite a bit of ground, I will try not to be too repetitive.

Earlier, the convener raised the question of our relationship with the UK tax and national insurance system. It seems that the fundamental problem is that the UK has two income tax systems, namely income tax and national insurance, and they do not relate to each other at all well. Have you picked up any suggestion that the UK Government is even looking at that issue, thinking of combining those systems or anything like that?

Given that the last revaluation was 23 years ago, even if it was just a reform of the present system and a revaluation, that would be major.

There seems to be a fairness and equality issue within it. In Glasgow, for example, it seems that property values have gone up more in some areas than in others. They have not gone up so much in poorer areas, such as my constituency, which are, therefore, relatively losing out with every year that goes by.

This question follows on from Michelle Thomson’s point about the ScotWind money. I accept the point that it is very hard to start a savings scheme, investment fund, sovereign wealth fund or whatever when we are in real financial challenges. Would a compromise be for that money to be ring fenced for capital expenditure—not necessarily just for renewables, but housing, roads, railways or whatever? That would be an investment for the future. Although we would not be setting the money aside, we would be saying that it is definitely going to an investment.

We note that the UK has gone into a recession—whether it is technical or not, it is a recession. We are sometimes told that raising tax somehow damages growth. However, the UK is in a recession—that is, it is not growing—under a Conservative Government, and it has relatively low tax compared with other countries, at 38 per cent of gross domestic product in tax compared with France at 50 per cent, for example. How do you reflect on the fact that the UK is a low-tax economy and is not growing?

You say that the next infrastructure investment plan

“will be published in due course.”

Will that be in May, or some other time?

Can you give us the timescale for the review?