Chamber and committees

The contrast is quite striking, though. You are right in the detail that you have provided—there is a lot of delayed capital spend, including for heat in buildings projects, vessels, piers programmes, and port works at Uig, Ardrossan and Gourock. None of these things is happening. Is this portfolio worse at delivering capital expenditure and its capital programmes than the NHS?

Given that there is also a net decrease of £98.8 million in expenditure on the education side of things, it feels a little bit as if you are saying, “We can make this kind of short-term coping investment, but we are really struggling to do some of these longer-term projects and invest in the economy, net zero and education.” Is that representative of your feeling with regard to how we are delivering this capital expenditure?

My final question is about capital expenditure and capital investment in the user case side of things.

Mr Neill, the facilities and technology that you want to put in would increase quality and assure the marketplace that you have a high-quality product, and it would open up new possibilities, but it will require additional investment from the industry. At the moment, your model for that is that if you can sell more, then you can invest back. It feels to me as though that is not necessarily something that we will do at pace. Is there more of a case for saying that we would be better off with a tax credit against the landfill tax that might be against the residual, unprocessed part of that waste?

The quarry that we visited last week spoke about the significant amount of money that it had to pay to put a residual amount of waste into landfill. I am just wondering whether there is a different mechanism that we could advocate for. It might not necessarily be in the bill, although it could be, but is there a different mechanism that would help you to make that capital investment more quickly?

I start from the position of wanting to make sure that the tax is as simple as possible for business across the board, and that we should differentiate things as little as possible. However, at the same time, we want to maximise the recycling rate. That is the tension that we are trying to investigate through various questions.

From the evidence so far, it strikes me that the tension is probably in two different areas. One is about expanding the marketplace. That might be done through price competition so that recycled aggregate is more competitive on price—in essence, it is cheaper because you do not have to pay the tax—or through broadening the use through the classification of aggregates and where they can be used.

I want to push you a bit on what the convener asked about at the start. How much more could we actually achieve? Given both of those variables, how much more is out there for us to try to put in place a policy regime to advance the cause of maximising recycling? Mr Neill said that we are in a lull at the moment but is this an infinite process in that, as long as the price conditions are there, we could just keep finding material? What is realistic when it comes to how much we could push up our recycling rate and get the environmental benefits of that? I will start with Mr Neill.

If the marketplace is there, you will be able to get more supply and you will be able to sell it.

Is that really the case with capital, though? We have a very under-delivered programme that already has huge backlogs, and you are pausing all new developments to try to bring the backlog of programmes in the capital development plan forward.

Mr Doak, I want to bring you back to my original question. That was a bit of a segue and we went back and forward, but it was about the capacity or potential. Do you have a sense of the scale of potential growth in the area?

That is useful. It feels like there is a reasonable amount of consensus. The question seems to be more about classification and use cases rather than price point.

On differentiation, there are lots of different products. Some of the virgin aggregates that we are talking about, whether it be red chips or others that are specific to the geology of Scotland, have a greater export value and it is worth shipping them long distances to neighbouring areas. There is an aggregate that we can export that has a higher price or value. Is there any case for saying that we should intervene more directly to protect those export or long-distance markets versus something that is more localised?

I know that that is partly about the price elasticity in transport. However, should we make the differentiation more pronounced? Should we say that Scottish red chip has a high price point and it is something that we can use, but the bill should differentiate between some of those classifications? Putting aside how difficult that would be, do you think there is a case to say that there should be more direct differentiation in the bill?

So the issue for you is more about demand rather than the supply side of your business.

We saw some excellent sand last week.