Chamber and committees

The discussion on the difficult choices that need to be made has very much focused on what to cut or disinvest from, but there are other difficult choices that Government and Parliament can make with regard to how we raise additional revenue and who we raise it from. I have a pretty open-ended question for you. I recognise that they create a separate set of challenges from that presented by simply reducing budgets, but what revenue-raising opportunities will there be over the next couple of years?

Thank you. That is all from me.

There was an allocation of £45 million to local authorities a bit earlier this year—I cannot remember exactly when, but it was certainly in the previous financial year—to bring additional resources such as teachers and support staff into schools, as a result of Covid. Since then, there has been a lot of political debate about the need to move teachers who are on temporary contracts on to permanent contracts. Have you had any indication that the £45 million will be baselined into the local government settlement in future? It is hard to see how we can move folk on temporary contracts that were funded from a one-off pot on to permanent contracts if the money is not baselined into the settlement.

My first question is probably for Gail Macgregor. Your submission makes what sounds like an entirely sensible point about the advantage if the review of the UK’s fiscal framework was to include consideration of the local government fiscal framework that is being developed. However, that begs a question of sequencing. I apologise if the information is already in the public domain and I should know it but, in the first instance, what timescale are you working to with the development of the local government fiscal framework?

My next question is about local government reserves, so it might be best directed to Alan Russell in the first instance. Have council reserves been disproportionately drawn down since the most recent set of numbers that I have seen, which were in the 2019-20 Audit Scotland paper? Your submission makes a point about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on communities, individuals and families who were already disadvantaged, particularly those who were socioeconomically disadvantaged. Have the local authorities that have higher rates of socioeconomic deprivation had a disproportionately higher need to draw down from their reserves?

I have no relevant interests to declare.

In the earlier part of our meeting, Linda Somerville from the STUC mentioned that its position is that we need to tax not just income, but wealth. Councillor Macgregor talked about other local revenue-raising opportunities, the transient visitor levy being one example. It was derailed by Covid, but there is still a broad appetite to move in that direction. We talked a moment ago about creative policy solutions being adopted in Scotland in the past years. Can other creative solutions for revenue raising be found at a local level?

To clarify, is the work that is being done purely internal to COSLA and the cross-party discussions that you talked about? Have any interim discussions been held with the Scottish Government at this point?

Yes. Thank you. I will go a little bit further. The SNSAs have a dual purpose: they are supposed to collect both formative and summative data. Their stated purpose is to help individual teachers in supporting their pupils and to provide that larger summative data about how the system as a whole is working. Romane Viennet made the point that SNSAs are not necessarily the best way to collect that data. To clarify, are you talking about the summative data? Is your point that SNSAs are not necessarily the best way to collect system-level data?

The Scottish Parliament information centre, which is a neutral research resource available to all members—it is not aligned with any one party—has just published more analysis of that. It highlights the potential difference between the Scottish Government accepting the headline recommendations of your report and responding to the wider commentary that it contains. For example, the report contains no specific headline recommendation on SNSAs, but there is wider commentary—as you just explained—on whether they are the most useful way to collect the required data. Would you expect the Scottish Government to respond directly to the points that the report makes around SNSAs?