Chamber and committees

We have a couple of minutes left. Jonathan Athow, if you want to add to that, please feel free to do so.

Agenda item 2 is consideration of the report entitled “Administration of Scottish income tax 2021/22”. I am pleased to welcome our witnesses from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Scottish Government. Alyson Stafford is director general of the Scottish exchequer, and Lorraine King is deputy director of the Scottish Government tax and revenues directorate. We are also joined by Jonathan Athow, who is director general for customer strategy and tax design at HMRC, and Phil Batchelor, who is deputy director for income tax policy at HMRC.

We have quite a number of questions that we want to put to the witnesses. However, before we get into those questions, I invite Alyson Stafford to make a short opening statement.

Again, for the avoidance of doubt, have those discussions recommenced? You said that they are going to. Is that a future or a present description?

Before Jonathan Athow does that, I will ask you a question. You said that the Scottish Government is in favour of a mixed economy, but it does not have a mixed economy in relation to the recovery of overpayments of social security, for example. It has a very clear policy that any overpayments through Social Security Scotland are recovered by in-house teams. That is not outsourced to private debt agencies, so why is this different?

I have one final question in this area. Do you expect there to be a higher level of income tax per head in Scotland as a result of the process of fiscal drag, wages going up, inflation rising and so on?

It would be helpful if you could notify the committee of when the minutes will be published on the website, so that we have warning of that.

I admit that I do not have last May’s medium-term financial strategy in front of me or at my fingertips. When you describe the downturn in the oil and gas industry affecting income tax take receipts in the north-east, we can broadly understand that, but to what extent do you have data that absolutely backs that up?

If the fee attached to the service level agreement or other parts of the memorandum of understanding were revised, that is something that you could do, if you had the resources.

That would be helpful.

This morning’s session has been very useful for the committee. I thank Alyson Stafford, Lorraine King, Jonathan Athow and Phil Batchelor for giving evidence. We will consider whether we would like to take any further steps but, for the time being, I thank you for your evidence and draw the public part of the meeting to a close.

Thank you. I am now going to move things on and invite Willie Coffey to put some questions to you.