Chamber and committees

As an independent public inquiry, it is for the Scottish Covid-19 inquiry to comment on its work as it progresses, including through its website: covid19inquiry.scot. In its role as sponsor, the Scottish Government remains committed to providing operational support, as the chair considers appropriate and necessary, in order to enable the inquiry to carry out its independent work and to ensure that the progress that has been made so far is continued. We want the inquiry to be delivered at speed, addressing the range of questions that people have, so that we can learn and benefit from any lessons as early as possible.

I am very happy to draw out as much detailed information as I can in a follow-up response to Christine Grahame. However, in relation to some key indicators, we have historically low unemployment and historically high employment levels across Scotland. Those factors will be felt acutely in areas such as the Borders and, in particular, in Midlothian, where there is such strong accessibility to labour markets. I will look to see what more detailed information I can provide to the member.

We have supported the National Union of Students’ think positive initiative, which signposts students to places where they can get help. Through student mental health agreements, student associations and institutions can work jointly on mental health practices.

There is work under way on the strategic delivery of that work, which is being taken forward by a working group chaired by the Minister for Higher Education and Further Education, Youth Employment and Training, and which is determined to ensure that we have the necessary steps in place to protect the mental wellbeing of young people and students.

There is a lot of merit in the points raised by Mr Coffey. We saw tremendous development in innovative community practice during Covid, whereby solutions were found by communities for individuals. The Government is intent on encouraging and nurturing that approach.

It is important that we are on our guard against a return to old ways of working. Some of the new ways of working that were developed during Covid have been of great benefit and advantage to our society and our communities. We want to ensure that we preserve those. I assure Mr Coffey that the Government is trying to design its funding interventions, particularly for measures such as the Dundee pathfinder work, to do exactly that.

I acknowledge the risk of behaviour change—I am not denying that it is a factor. Our response is to say that, from the information that we have, we have not seen evidence of people relocating for tax purposes. That does not mean to say that there may not be a certain amount of behavioural change in the way that income is accounted for or tax arrangements are made, which are tax planning practices that are quite different from relocating.

We are also quite early in the era of tax divergence between Scotland and the rest of United Kingdom. We do not have many years’ experience of that divergence. We have to be attentive to the detail and open about exploring those questions. In the policy-making space, we have to be conscious of the risks of behavioural change and factor those into our consideration of what tax changes to make—if any.

That adds financial strain to next year.

I do not think that it says that; it simply says that that is the best estimate that we have. A financial memorandum looks at the position many years hence. Operational decisions are taken about the expected expenditure for any particular programme. Those numbers will be constantly reviewed. As I have tried to explain to the committee previously, the Government is concentrating on the preparations in two respects—getting the initial organisational arrangements in place and boosting the salaries of social care workers—which is why we have allocated a substantial amount of money in the budget to enable those to happen.

I think that what you suggest is an option, but I can just imagine the sight of John Swinney turning up at COSLA headquarters to say, “We’re going to do a top-down reform of local government finance departments”—I imagine that Mr Lumsden would be at the front of the queue to support me in all my efforts. It is possible, but I would much rather encourage a process in which local authorities make the necessary changes at their own hands. I do not think that the Government should be making those changes to them.

Let me express my frustration about that point. You alight on a particular problem. I go back to the world that I used to occupy as education secretary, dealing with 32 education authorities and 32 directors of education. Local authorities are of widely varying sizes, so the director of education in the city of Glasgow and the director of education in Clackmannanshire, for example, will be dealing with fundamentally different propositions. To take the Clackmannanshire example, some years ago, Clackmannanshire and Stirling councils did quite a bit of collaboration and got very close to running a joint education service. Nobody lost their identity or their focus on education. However, the councils decided to dismantle those arrangements, which I think is a point of regret.

There is scope for exactly what you suggest. I have encouraged local authorities to work together on the creation of regional improvement collaboratives among groups of local authorities, in which a lot of good work on education goes on. Shared leadership would help with an awful lot of these things as well.

I accept that that is me beginning to get into the territory of specifying what local government should do. I am left with the pretty strong impression and message from local government that that would not be particularly welcome.

It depends on what you mean by “a blueprint”. If that is a list of office buildings to be rationalised, that is unlikely. I do not think that that is how such a programme should be predicated. We should be starting from a perspective of looking at how to reduce costs, improve efficiency and rationalise the estate and should then challenge public bodies to ensure that that happens.

Some of those things will have to happen because of the financial constraints caused by the budget. That will apply right across the public sector. I hope that the Government’s response to the committee’s report, and the detail that we have gone into, gives the committee more clarity about the direction of travel, but it does not give a list of operational changes that will take place. We can report on those as they take their course.

I am very happy to keep the committee informed about developments in that respect, which I think will address some of the issues.