Chamber and committees

On staff pay, it is understandable that the nation’s Parliament wants to be seen as a fair employer. How do we benchmark some of the salaries that are received by staff who work in this building against those that are received by staff who work elsewhere?

Yes, I am sure that that would be helpful.

I might be getting a little granular here, but I looked at the trading accounts for the Parliament shop, and I have two questions about that. The first is about direct salaries, the figure for which has bounced around a little. It is now £126,000 a year, which seems to account for one manager plus one and a third support staff in the shop—in other words, 2.3 individuals. The one and a third staff are on grade 2, which has a salary of £30,000 to £33,000. That seems to be about 25 to 30 per cent more than the average retail salary. Is there a reason why the salaries of those staff seem not to be aligned with salaries outside the Scottish Parliament, in the broader retail sector?

My question is also about workforce issues. I note that you currently have a freeze on essential recruitment and a head count of 145. We have just been discussing public sector reform with the Auditor General, including reforms to structures and to the workforce. The private sector organisations that you work with will be seeing a dramatic shift in the needs and skills of their own workforces. One current issue right across the public sector in Scotland is the assumption against compulsory redundancies. As you reform and look at your own structure and workforce, would lifting that restriction on compulsory redundancies be helpful in ensuring that your organisation is truly match fit for the challenge of delivering for enterprise in the south of Scotland?

This is obviously a complex area, as you have alluded to. In relation to landlords’ sentiment, you talked about the supply being generally flat at the moment. What about the demand from tenants? Edinburgh, for example, has had the highest increase in rental prices anywhere in the United Kingdom—it was 12.6 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Although supply is flat, demand is rising and therefore, in a perfect market, you would surely assume that more people would enter the market to increase the supply.

Could you work with the Scottish Government to better define what preventative expenditure actually is? When we put it to the Government that social security expenditure is not necessarily an investment or preventative, it said that that expenditure prevents people from living in poverty and therefore is preventative. To try to crack that issue, is there more work that you can do to help to create definitions so that we do not end up unintentionally or intentionally defining expenditure that is not preventative as being preventative?

Finally, if there was any evidence to suggest that buy-to-let investors were leaving the market and that that was constraining supply, would the Scottish Government be willing to look at any form of exemption or reduction in ADS for those who buy properties for the purpose of putting them on the rental market?

Good morning, Alison. In addition to the sponsored bodies that you engage with, you have committed a considerable amount of money to Sustrans through a number of programmes—principally, the places for everyone programme. I understand that that programme is coming to an end and that you will move to a model whereby you directly fund councils for active travel.

Obviously, that was an innovative way of funding those projects and developments but, bearing in mind that Sustrans is a charity and also a lobbying organisation, does the fact that you are moving to a model whereby you fund councils directly reflect any concerns about delivering those services through such a model?

That is an important issue, and I would welcome the views of other representatives if they wanted to come in on that.

Good morning, minister, and happy new year. It is clear from what you have set out that the measure is raising revenue, but it is less clear that it is meeting its policy objectives. If you were to give a percentage level of confidence and assurance that the measure is actually meeting the objective of protecting opportunities for first-time buyers, what would that percentage be? Would it be 10 per cent, 50 per cent or 80 per cent?

I want to go back to Lynne Raeside, briefly. In relation to the Scottish budget and the Scottish economy, it is vitally important that the proceeds of having highly skilled and highly paid jobs are shared throughout Scotland. Last year, Dumfries and Galloway had the largest net outbound migration of young people and was one of seven local authority areas in Scotland that experienced net depopulation.

What is the silver bullet that we need at the national level to ensure that, if we bring skilled jobs to Scotland, we do not see them only in Edinburgh and—as might be the case to a lesser extent now—Aberdeen? On the shift in population and population saturation by local authority area, East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian are clearly buckling under the pressure. What do we need to do at the national level to make sure that we can bring skilled jobs, firstly, to Scotland and, secondly, to areas like the south-west of Scotland, where there is clearly an issue in relation to young workers leaving the region?