Chamber and committees

Mr Moxham, you said earlier on that you favour reform being at a more local level. If I understood you correctly, I tend to agree with that. However, it has been suggested to us that there is sometimes a need for a central drive. For example, the police and fire services would never have reorganised in the way that they did—for good or bad—if it had not been for a central drive. How much should we leave public sector reform to the individual organisations, and how much should Government or the Parliament drive it?

It has been suggested to us that there are too many public bodies. Perhaps several overlap with each other in what they do.

I am going back to some of the predictions and forecasts that were made, both by you and by the OBR. I accept that the war in Ukraine was probably not predictable—although some experts in the field might say that it was—but neither the Fiscal Commission, the OBR nor wider society saw the rise in inflation coming. In retrospect, should we have been able to predict that inflation was coming?

I will move back to income tax to carry on with some of the points that have already been raised. I get the point about higher earners and self-assessment. If people are self-employed, they might not know what their earnings will be for a year, let alone anyone else knowing. However, the earnings of higher earners such as the chief executive of a council or someone like that, who, I presume, will be in the self-assessment category, would be quite predictable. Are they just swamped by the ones that are unpredictable?

Is the self-assessment money in Scotland more volatile than that of the rest of the UK, or are we not sure about that?

I have the same two questions for Mr Thomson. Are you concerned about the timescales, or is that not a factor for you?

I suppose that I expected people to move up the tax bands as the limits were frozen, but I was a bit more surprised that the total number of taxpayers had increased.

Would seven years make a difference?

I remember 15 per cent inflation. We just lived with that, but people are not used to it now. Do we have to accept that the same thing is likely to happen in the future and that we might see a bit of inflation coming but that it will be hard to predict how much?

On landfill tax, the comment was made that incineration capacity was limited and uncertain. I do not know whether that was about machinery breaking down or what it was, but I assume that it meant that more had to be put into landfill when it should have been incinerated.