Chamber and committees

I will move on to a different area. You mentioned in your initial remarks that most areas of UK Government spending will avoid cuts over the next few years and will be at the level that was expected pre-pandemic. I am interested in how you account for the specific effects of Covid.

If we leave aside the capital issues for projects such as high speed 2, real-terms spending on transport will be relatively steady over the next few years. However, patronage of buses and trains is way down and operators still require significant subsidies. If the budget is frozen in real terms and there are no cuts, a substantial chunk of that money will go into operator subsidies that were not accounted for pre-pandemic. Will that result in a kind of displaced austerity? Will there be cuts not to the overall budget but to areas of UK departmental budgets to cover for the effect of Covid?

Thank you. I am conscious of the time, so I am happy to leave it there.

Do you know off hand what the early indications are for hospitality? I am thinking specifically about the questions that Liz Smith asked. Any changes that affect the hospitality sector’s contribution to the tax base will have a disproportionate effect on Scotland in the same way that, say, changes to agriculture’s contribution would.

I am interested in the issue of stranded assets but, given the time, there is one other area that I would like to touch on. Charlie Bean in particular has mentioned a few times the impact of upward pressure on wages. I am interested in the knock-on effect that that would have on the relative value of different sectors to the overall tax base. For example, if the hospitality and road haulage sectors recover from the pandemic as smaller but higher-wage sectors, that will have a differential impact on income tax versus corporation tax versus fuel duty, and so on. How soon do you expect to have a strong indication of the direction of travel in respect of sector-specific differences in recovery?

Thanks—I will leave it there.

To stick with the point on skills shortages and mismatches, will you expand a little on the sectors that are experiencing a skills shortage, as opposed to a labour shortage for other reasons such as wage pressure and migration issues?

I turn now to Jennifer King, and then Laura Caven, on the same question of gathering data effectively so that we can make targeted and effective interventions. Are there examples of on-going or planned work in this area? Our committee is minded to recommend that further work be done here, but it would be useful for us to know whether COSLA and ADES have either on-going work or planned work in this area, to identify exactly what the impacts have been. We have had a lot of discussions about the disproportionate impact on children with additional support needs, but that is itself a vast category, because we are talking about more than one in every four young people. It is clear from the discussions that we have just had that there has been a very different impact on children with autism from the impact on those with visual or hearing impairments, for instance. It would be useful to know whether any work is already being done in that area, as that would provide us with the kind of information that we are looking for.

Absolutely. That was very useful. Thank you. I am conscious of the time but, Laura Caven, is there anything that you would like to add from COSLA’s perspective?

If I could be a bit cheeky, I will ask for both. That would be great. If you have an anecdote that you could offer us now, we would be interested in it, but a follow-up in writing would be great.

I will go back to the convener’s line of questioning about the children and families for whom lockdown provided an opportunity for engagement with education that was not happening before. The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland made that point to us a few weeks ago, and I am interested in Joan Tranent’s perspective on it. She talks rightly about the need for us to bear that engagement in mind and for social work teams to bear it in mind for their future strategies for schools. However, schools have been back to something approaching normal since August. In-person learning has been the default since that point.

From what Joan Tranent has seen and heard so far, for the children who re-engaged with education—perhaps for the first time in quite some time—through lockdown and remote learning, has learning at local authority or school level been preserved or are we already seeing instances of children who were disengaged pre-pandemic and engaged by the unique circumstances of remote learning starting to disengage again because the adaptations that were made for them have not been continued? Are there good examples of schools, local authorities or social work teams that have managed to continue the link with children for whom it was challenging before March last year?