Chamber and committees

Another cost that has been mentioned is that of the information technology set-up. We all know that IT costs sometimes run out of control. An IT set-up cost of £50,000 has been suggested, with annual maintenance costs of only £7,000. Those figures seem quite low to me.

You have made the point that, even if a new council was set up and it recommended an expansion of who could receive benefits, that would not necessarily happen, for a variety of reasons, one of which relates to cost. If the council was set up and it recommended that more people should get benefits—more women, for example, or more people with other injuries or diseases, or perhaps stress—where would the budget come from? The fire service has been looking for support to deal with cancer-related issues, and there are teachers with stress and so on. This is not in the bill, but if the figure of £84 million, or £81 million, that has been mentioned were to double, would that be financially feasible?

Without pre-empting the coming consultation, you are saying that that could be an option and that all the advice, research and other functions could be fitted into an existing body, instead of setting up a new one.

You raise quite a lot of points, one of which is about research. I understand that, at the UK level, there is only £100,000 for research, which seems incredibly low. The bill proposes a figure of £30,000 for research. Do you get a lot of research for £30,000, as far as you know?

My question may be partly on the same theme. You wrote in your paper:

“It has been a story of high expectations bumping up against implicit, consequently rendered explicit, constraints”.

How many of the constraints are financial constraints? You have spoken quite a lot about bureaucracy, process and so on, but is one of the major constraints a lack of finance?

Would the proposed council help with that, or is that entirely a matter of employment law, which is reserved to Westminster?

I ask Ms Somerville the same question—I was going to come to you anyway on that point.

Right. I will just pursue that point with Ms Somerville for a minute, and then I will come back to Mr McKenzie.

The STUC paper was very good on tax options and so on, but we still have a relatively fixed pot of money. Would you say that we could put more into the benefits system only if we raised more tax, or do you think that we should reallocate money? The national health service has a huge budget—we could take a bit out of there and put it into compensation.

My role is to ask about finance. I will start with Norman Provan. You were enthusiastic about the system being run much less on paper and more through information technology. The set-up costs for the IT and the website are only £50,000. That seems quite low, given that IT can be very expensive. Do you have any thoughts on that figure?

Does anyone else have any comments? The salary costs are £175,000.