Chamber and committees

I appreciate that. Thank you.

I have a couple of questions around industrial relations, which are for Shona Struthers and Andrew Witty in the first instance.

I am sure that you will have seen that, as part of this inquiry, I have asked witnesses in previous sessions why they believe that we have had industrial disputes in the sector in seven of the past eight years when we have not had that in any other sector in Scotland. Would you like to have an opportunity to comment on that, in the first instance? What do you think has brought us to the point at which that has become, in essence, an annual occurrence?

On one level, I recognise that things have improved, because I have been involved to a varying extent over most of the years concerned. However, even with improvements, there has still been national industrial action in almost every one of those years—certainly, in every one of the past few years. If things are improving, why is there still national strike action every year?

It felt a bit like you sidestepped the issue of principals’ pay, there.

Thank you.

I apologise for missing your opening statement, Deputy First Minister. Each stage of my journey this morning was delayed by the weather.

You made a comment a moment ago about damage to the housing market. Will the Government or Revenue Scotland be in a position in the coming weeks and months to issue revised projections for LBTT receipts, given the impact of the mini-budget on mortgages?

The live data is useful, but I was asking about the assumptions that the Government might make. If we assume, for the purpose of those projections, that there is no change to LBTT policy, projections of long-term income from that tax will be based on assumptions about the effect on the housing market. I am sure that the data for this month and next will look bad. There is a role for Government in trying to make a long-term assumptions, for planning purposes, about how long that effect will last, because that will affect discussions about LBTT policy.

I have a technical question that I perhaps should already know the answer to. How is the interest rate set for the national loans fund? I am conscious that, in recent years, it has been less than 1.5 per cent. However, given the expectation of the resource that the Government is going to be drawing from that fund over the coming years, changes to that interest rate could have relatively significant long-term effects. However, I am not clear how that interest rate is set.

Yes, that will be useful.

I have a wider question. You might be aware of some of the evidence that the committee has taken from various stakeholders in recent weeks. As you would expect, absolutely everybody believes that their sector should be prioritised for additional public spending, yet very few are willing to volunteer where that money might come from. Almost no one is willing to volunteer a cut to funding in another area. Some organisations have come to us with revenue-raising proposals—I can commend Unison’s as some of the most specific proposals that I have seen in quite some time. Other organisations simply say, “Well, you can fund the extra spending that we think we need from tax increases.” They tend to be quite vague; they tend to make statements to say, “Oh well, there are more tax powers to be used than are currently being used.”

In part, I interpret that to be due to a lack of familiarity with the data that is currently available on tax and spend in Scotland. For example, a lot of organisations are not particularly familiar with the fact that the ready reckoners on income tax are published every year. Those organisations would struggle if they were to come up with their own proposals on the reform of, for example, LBTT or council tax.

How do you think we can improve the quality of public debate and public knowledge among key stakeholder groups—not necessarily the public at large—about the tax side of the equation at budget time? If we do not do that, we will continue to be stuck in the loop that we have been in for a long time, in which everyone asks for more money and says that it is simply up to the Parliament and the Government to decide where that money comes from. How do we improve the quality of debate about raising revenue?

What are the Government’s expectations of the effect of fiscal drag this year on income tax receipts?