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.

I have a final question on the education side of things. I note a £29.8 million increase for the Scottish Qualifications Authority to support its on-going activities. Could you tell us what that money is for? After all, this is an organisation that, in 2021, we were told was not fit for purpose and had to be scrapped, because the leadership was failing. Should we be giving these people £29.8 million to spend when ministers have already decided that they are not capable of running their own organisation properly?

I will finish on the social security side. You have touched on some of this already. There is a £284.2 million increase for demand-led expenditure, with a net impact of £50 million, given that there are areas where forecasts have decreased—I understand that. There has been an extraordinary rise in out-of-work benefits since the pandemic, which is a huge challenge across the UK and internationally. Is that something that ministers discuss when they talk about a demand-led budget? If that trend continues, our ability to cope with it within our resources must be a real concern for ministers.

This is just an opportunity to put these things to the Government and ask it what its thinking is about how we can make sure that the acceleration is there. I take on board colleagues’ points about my predilection within this issue, but we need to make sure that the system is as simple as possible and that it can be cross-border and clean while thinking about what we can do to accelerate it.

I suppose that our questions relate to the pipeline of work. We have heard ministers—you included—talk about a 10 per cent cut, as you have called it, in capital expenditure, but it seems to have resulted in a 100 per cent cut in capital projects going forward in the NHS or in a full pause while you wait for further clarity. It would be very useful to get an idea of how much of that relates to legacy spend that has already been committed and therefore has to be coped with.

Perhaps I can contrast that a little bit with your approach to net zero and just transition. Capital spend in the NHS has gone up by £235 million, while the net zero and just transition portfolio is seeing a net decrease of £217.9 million. Is that a decision that ministers have taken, or is that just the reality of where the projects find themselves?

On that visit, we also heard that it is about distance, because much of the carbon impact comes from transport. Mr Sharma, will you respond to that point about the balance between where you source the material versus the kind of material? How is your local authority balancing that in considering its carbon impact?