Chamber and committees

For those who are on pay as you earn, the system is the system and they will probably have quite limited interaction with it. For those who are self-employed and businesses navigating their way through the tax system, our agencies and HMRC work closely with Revenue Scotland to make sure that public information for taxpayers, whoever they are, is as clear as possible. Improvements can be made. That was a theme that came out of the tax strategy, and work is being done to simplify the information and make it more straightforward and easier to understand.

For the £750 million, yes.

What they do with the money is up to them. The distribution group will allocate to each of the 32 local authorities. It is then entirely up to them how they use that money.

Your point is well made. Local authorities commission social care services differently, for example. Whether they try to address some of that will be entirely up to them, but I suspect that it will inevitably come to their door anyway.

Let me be clear: the work on the spending review has been kicked off, so we will not be waiting until after the election. That work will then go ahead at pace and I will work with the committee on the timetable for that, as it is a major undertaking. It is important to communicate with the committee and the Parliament on the spending review.

That line in the response was just a recognition that there is an election. Any new Administration, whatever its colour, will want to put its own stamp on spending plans. That line was just to recognise that the spending plans will be the spending plans until somebody decides otherwise. We can set out the detail of what we believe to be the right correlation of spending envelopes for what, and there may well be a shift—which is what a spending review is all about. We will have to take cognisance of the UK spending review, and there is a lot of chat about what the various envelopes might look like in the future.

The resource spending review set a direction of travel, but we are now getting beyond that high-level direction of travel in order to force the pace. Perhaps we have recognised that things were not happening at a pace that we were satisfied with and that we had to do things differently, which is what Ivan McKee is doing.

I do not think that local government in England is particularly happy at all, per se. I cannot really speak for it, but I have seen an unhappy tone in the media.

The Welsh also have a gap. It may be slightly less than ours, but it is significant.

The sustainability delivery plan will look at a five-year horizon. I accept the point about the need for an acknowledgement that looking beyond that brings into focus some of the demographic challenges that we are all aware of. Although there will be a five-year action plan, there will be an acknowledgement of those longer-term pressures that many countries—not just ours—are facing. We must use the levers that we have, but we also need some levers that we do not have at the moment. For example, migration would be an extremely welcome tool in helping us to recruit into key sectors where we have shortages and to grow the economy.

I will write to the committee with the information that I have garnered. I have had some detailed discussions with social security colleagues about that, because I wanted to reassure myself.

The budget set out a great deal of what is contained in the capital allocation—£768 million for affordable housing, for example, and other capital commitments for 2025-26.

When councils set council tax rates, we expect them to give careful consideration to local needs and services, while at the same time being mindful of the impact on residents and on household budgets, which are still under pressure.

As I said in my earlier answers, for 2025-26 councils will receive over £15 billion through the settlement. I think that that should mean that there is no need for any excessive, inflation-busting increases. What do I mean by that? I am not going to set a figure and say, “This is it, and anything above that is absolutely appalling.” I do not think that that would be helpful. I would hope that we will all be in a reasonable space and want to see increases kept to a minimum.

Each local authority will be different. I am aware that some of our smaller authorities might have additional pressures in areas where some of the larger authorities have more resilience. That is why it is important for us to look beyond the budget at the sustainability of some of our local authorities. How can they work together? How can we help them to become more resilient and more sustainable?

We have listened to the desire of local government not to have a freeze or a cap. The other side of that bargain is for them to recognise that, in setting the council tax, they should take account of the needs of local residents. I hope that we can get to somewhere that is a reasonable landing space.