Chamber and committees

Kevin Northcott, is your experience at Rossie Young People’s Trust similar?

Before we come to Kevin Northcott, I want to ask about the example that you gave of waiting on a transport provider to come from Portsmouth to move somebody from one end of Glasgow to the other. Is that because there are very specific providers that you think provide the right quality of service, or is there just an absolute lack of service providers elsewhere in Scotland, which is why you need to go so far to find someone?

I am interested in hearing the witnesses’ thoughts on transport to and from secure accommodation, in particular, for all the young people we are talking about. You may not have direct experience of that, but, if you do, I would be interested in hearing about it.

The hope instead of handcuffs campaign made the point that, while we have been on a journey of gradually increasing standards, regulations and inspections of secure accommodation itself, transport has been missed out. There have been instances of what the campaign believes to have been inappropriate use of restraint. It proposes, among other things, a mandatory system of reporting of every incident of restraint and seclusion.

In the first instance, I am interested in hearing whether anybody has any reflections on the current state of play on transport provision to and from secure accommodation. We heard from the previous panel about the basic logistical challenge of even trying to get a transport provider at all and about having to get people from the south of England to come up to Montrose to collect a young person and go to Ninewells hospital, which is 30 minutes away. If anybody has any initial thoughts on that, it would be very helpful to hear them.

Thanks very much. That is all from me, convener.

Absolutely. Thanks very much.

That is relevant to questions on preventative spend. We can keep launching more money into health, but it is not going to reduce demand. The challenge for us, then, is how we take money out of health and put it into prevention. That is politically challenging.

Finally, I want to ask about your projections for growth in local government tax revenue—and I accept that this will be more of a political question that you might want to avoid completely. It feels like we are relying far too little on local government tax, bearing in mind that in Scotland we rely too much on devolved income tax. Under our current powers, it is through local government tax that we can tax wealth, property and so on—in other words, we have more latitude with local government taxation—but the projected growth from local government tax is minimal and the overall share of tax revenue from local taxes relatively minimal. Do you have concerns that, given the overall issue of fiscal sustainability here, not enough discussion is being had about how to reform local taxation?

Absolutely, John. Thanks.

The report notes that the growth in the block grant is largely going to be driven by increased health spending in England. If the assumption is that the consensus in Scottish politics continues and that health consequentials go straight into Scottish health spending, I presume that that will result in a relative deficit in non-health areas—that is, everything other than health—of Scottish Government spending and that they will be worse than the overall headline figure. Has any work been done on trying to disaggregate that to look at the sustainability of all of our non-health spending?

That is our job—we all pick the number that we want.

Thanks, convener. I should flag up that I have an event with the Presiding Officer at 25 past 12, so I will apologise now for having to slip out early if we run over a wee bit.

I should also caveat my question by saying that, like colleagues on the committee, I really appreciate the huge amount of work that has gone into the report. On the productivity projections, would you, for illustrative purposes, be able to project the impact on the deficit—the 1.7 per cent and 10 per cent figures—if our productivity, instead of running as currently projected, were to mirror the European Union average, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average and so on?

Going back to the convener’s point about policy choices, I know that everybody and their gran has, at some point, come up with a plan to boost productivity, and none of them has really worked. How much effort should we continue to put into that instead of trying to pull other policy levers to address the deficit?

Do any of the witnesses’ organisations have engagement and contact with transportation providers in relation to secure accommodation? If so, I have some specific follow-up questions; if not, there is no need for them.