Chamber and committees

Yes, that is totally fine.

The level of integration between children’s services and other services has been mentioned quite a bit already, particularly in answer to Willie Rennie’s line of questioning and, in the COSLA submission, particularly in relation to early years childcare provision. If the decision is made to transfer children’s services to the new national care service, how easy will it be to disaggregate that discrete spending from the wider spending that local authorities put into services that are for children in some way, rather than the specific children’s social services that we are talking about?

You have already mentioned that this is a framework bill, and that the decision whether to transfer children’s services will be taken not as part of this legislative process but later on. Is there any information that has not been provided but which you think is critical before Parliament further considers the bill, or can we wait for the future decision specifically on children’s services?

My first question is on sequencing. I entirely understand the point that you made in your opening remarks about what Parliament’s standing orders require you to lay out in a financial memorandum, and I appreciate your comment about not pre-empting the result of co-design processes. However, for me, that raises the obvious—if perhaps daft laddie—question of why we did not go through the co-design process before we reached this stage of the parliamentary process.

I appreciate that, as you have said and as we would all expect, you are engaged in discussions with the UK Government on achieving VAT neutrality, but surely, until those discussions reach what we hope is a positive conclusion, the default position is that there will be VAT liability. If that is the status quo at present, until an agreement is reached, I am not sure why it has not been covered in the financial memorandum.

I and the committee will appreciate that further information, but given Ms Bennett’s answer, there seems, at least, to be a range of potential costs that could be assumed for VAT. My understanding of the standing orders on what is required for financial memorandums is that such a range could have been put into this financial memorandum.

I absolutely accept that there are drawbacks to both approaches, but do you accept that the drawback with this sequence of events is the challenge that it presents to parliamentary scrutiny of what, in the Government’s own words, is the most significant reform taking place in the current parliamentary session?

Finally, the emergency budget review, which was announced last week, included a £70 million saving in the budget line for social care and the NCS. We all understand why the review was necessary, and I am not disputing the need for it, but how much of that £70 million, if any, relates to NCS costs in the current financial year?

That would be appreciated—thank you.

In the first instance, I would be interested in your thoughts on the level of pay in Scotland’s colleges, specifically at senior management and principal levels. Do you think that it is justifiable that there are multiple college principals in Scotland who earn more than the First Minister?