Chamber and committees

Thank you. I have a specific question on additional support needs spending. If you do not have the relevant information to hand, I will understand. However, there is a wider point that I want to make. I put this question to the local authority officials last week.

The local financial returns for 15 of the 32 councils record nil spends on additional support needs outside special schools—in other words, on ASN in primary and secondary settings. Obviously, those authorities are spending money on that; every local authority spends substantial amounts on ASN in primary and secondary settings. The question is how we track that spend. The committee will endeavour to find out why some local authorities record their spending in that way and why others provide more detailed information on their ASN spending.

I take your point that the Government has put in substantial investment, the vast majority of which is not ring fenced. However, the Government has a specific interest in improving outcomes for young people with additional support needs. How do we track the impact of that spend, particularly when it is hard to track how much spend there is in the first place?

How do we strike the right balance and resolve the tension between what we have all signed up for with regard to focusing much more on outcomes rather than inputs and the reality that significant importance will always be placed on the amount of money that we put into the system? Inevitably, there will be political debates about where that money is prioritised. In this case, the outcomes for young people who have diagnosed additional support needs are the most important thing for us to measure. However, we can still tell quite a lot from looking at the amount of money that we are putting into the system and where it is going, and then tracking that against the outcomes.

How does the Government balance those things in areas such as ASN, particularly given the inconsistency in the data? Ultimately, you cannot set a budget based on outcomes; the budget needs to explain how much money will go to X, Y and Z.

Yes. Thank you, convener.

A vast amount of funding has gone into expanding early years provision. Notwithstanding the challenges that have been highlighted, the direction of travel has been broadly positive.

However, one significant area of concern for me is childcare and nursery provision in colleges. The issue is similar to the convener’s point about working and living across local authority boundaries. For a lot of parents, particularly those whom we really want to see in college, for whom we want to break down those access barriers, having childcare provision on the college campus that they are attending is essential to enabling them to access further education, but we are, pretty continuously, seeing a loss of college nursery facilities.

The most recent one that has been flagged up to me is at New College Lanarkshire’s Cumbernauld campus, although there is a bit of ambiguity around whether that facility will be closed just for six months before a new operator reopens it. Regardless, the overall trend has been a loss of capacity in that regard, whereas we have seen a significant expansion of provision elsewhere.

Has the Government discussed that directly both with colleges themselves and with the local authorities in which they operate?

That would be helpful. Thank you.

I have a couple of questions about the tracking of spending on additional support needs. The context is probably the Verity house agreement, so I would like to briefly return to that. You described the process as an iterative one—in other words, the fiscal framework will not be fully brought in for the coming budget, which makes sense. However, I want to probe further on that. Is it expected that all those arrangements will be in place by the end of the parliamentary session or by the time of the next council elections in 2027, or is there not a fixed timescale for that because the process will evolve on the basis of the relationship?

I completely appreciate the difficulties that the sector is under and that it is a question of survival for some businesses, but this is very literally a question of survival for those workers who are being paid a poverty wage.

Part of the challenge for us as a committee and for the Parliament overall is that really compelling asks are made of us for further expansion of the social security system. There is no reason why, in a country as rich as this, one in five children should be in poverty; we have spent £450 million-ish on the Scottish child payment to lift 90,000 children out of poverty, but there are hundreds of thousands more children whom we could lift out of poverty if we spent more money on that.

That money needs to come from somewhere, and it comes largely from tax. Income tax is the biggest tax lever that we have, but the fact is that, relative to the UK as a whole—and certainly to London and the south-east—Scotland is a low-wage economy. As a result, one of the ways in which we can tackle poverty directly at source while raising additional tax revenue that we can spend on direct interventions is by boosting wages.

However, what I am seeing are challenges when I look at, say, the media coverage the Government floating the idea of potential additional conditionality to existing non-domestic rates relief with regard to the living wage—I believe that that was off the back of a question asked by Liz Smith and answered by Tom Arthur. I saw comments in the press yesterday and today from the Scottish Hospitality Group objecting to such a move, and I am really struggling to square the circle of business sectors coming to Parliament and making a perfectly compelling and legitimate case for more spending or tax relief in their areas without being willing to accept the conditions that I think could be reasonably associated with that, not just to tackle the wider structural issues in our economy but to have a very direct impact on people’s lives. Should it not be a straightforward case of saying, “Yeah, you know what—we do want additional tax relief but we are willing to take additional conditions alongside that to play our parts in driving up wages”?

You have made a very compelling case, for the benefit of the Signature Group’s vacancies page, to anybody who is watching and considering a role in hospitality.

I have a couple of other questions, convener, but I am conscious of the time.

Just so I am completely clear, is the issue at the moment that we are not clear exactly what the barriers in the procurement system are to SMEs—although we can all probably guess and we have plenty of anecdotal evidence—and that, therefore, we need to do that basic data collection first before we come up with policy proposals?

Louise Maclean, you mentioned that the Signature Group’s minimum wage is about £13 or £15 an hour, which sounds really positive. I assume that that is a starting salary, whatever the age of the worker. As I think you mentioned in your evidence just a moment ago, your written submission includes an argument that additional non-domestic rates relief for the sector would be effective in terms of tackling poverty and low pay. I assume that the Scottish Hospitality Group would be relaxed if an additional relief was brought in, which was conditional on businesses paying at least the real living wage, regardless of age.

Thank you—that was useful. You also mentioned the visitor levy as an example of additional regulation. Is your issue about how it is implemented rather than the principle of the levy, or is the FSB opposed to any visitor levy at all?