Chamber and committees

You can ask another, if you like.

Scotland’s only no-take zone is in my constituency, so we can do a lot more in the marine area. However, I will stick to land at the moment.

You have said that it would be great to increase the number of squirrels, pine martens, birds and so on, but what about increasing the number of apex predators? Wolves died out in Scotland in the 17th or 18th century, and bears died out perhaps 1,000 years earlier. Minnesota has reintroduced wolves, but the move was viciously opposed for understandable reasons by farmers and people who were brought up on “Little Red Riding Hood” and so on and thought that wolves would have a severe impact on human populations, which they do not. I do not think that Scotland is quite ready for such a reintroduction, but might it be palatable in the decades to come? The red deer population in Scotland is high because there is a lack of predation. Is that an argument for introducing a predator that could reduce their numbers, so that we could protect the trees—an issue that we have just been talking about—without introducing culling?

I am sorry, but I must interrupt you. I neglected to give apologies from our deputy convener, Daniel Johnson, who is unable to be with us because he has Covid and is quite unwell. I apologise for forgetting to say that and for interrupting you, Mr Blackburn, but I wanted to put that on the record.

Yes—waiting for decisions to be made can be quite frustrating. However, if we are looking at something that is about cost cutting and that involves a host of Government departments, umpteen ministers, consultation and so on, we need to try to make sure that we do not end up with unintended consequences. For example, we do not want some people being so heavily penalised that they could go out of business, whereas other people make a killing out of it. We need to try to get the balance right. We need to get the 10-year programme, or whatever it might be, right. There would have to be checks and balances, because there is no doubt that decisions would be made that would prove to be wrong when it came to delivery, because nothing ever works as one would hope.

On constraints, you talked about a UK solution. You mentioned the importance of working with the UK, and I think that everyone would agree that that is essential on this huge issue. However, we cannot always move at the pace of the slowest caravan, so should the Scottish Government look at things on two levels—what the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government can deliver in one sphere, and what we can deliver with the co-operation of the UK in another? Is that possible? Can that be done on a parallel track?

Even if there were an overall increase in tax take, there is still a potential for the imposition of significant costs on the public through laws or regulations. For example, we were told that the installation of renewable heat in people’s homes could cost up to £33 billion over the next eight years. The cost per house is colossal. There is about £1.8 billion available for that. If we assume that we have heating engineers to deliver the programme within eight years—I am dubious about that—how do we deliver those admirable ideas in practical terms, both financially and ensuring that we have the people to deliver them on the ground?

I will now suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a changeover of officials.

I thank colleagues around the table for their questions, and I thank the minister for his evidence.

Item 3 is formal consideration of the motion on the Scottish statutory instrument. I invite the minister to move motion S6M-03069.

Motion moved,

That the Finance and Public Administration Committee recommends that the Budget (Scotland) Act 2021 Amendment Regulations 2022 be approved.—[Tom Arthur]

Motion agreed to.

I knew it—okay, right.

I get what you are saying, Professor Heald, but there is another difficulty in addition to the political difficulties of putting money away at a time when there is huge pressure on budgets, as there is at the moment. In previous decades, we saw a tendency in UK Governments to have, for example, what were, as I remember, called election bribes. Governments would have a couple of years of really difficult and unpalatable policies and then, suddenly, at the end of their four or five years, they would have a big pot of money. They would say that that was because their policies were working and they would blow the money on a pre-election splurge.

The difficulty is that that would perhaps be a temptation for a Government that was building up such a reserve. If it was 4 or 5 per cent behind in the polls, for example, it might feel a need to oil the wheels a bit and say that all the difficult policies that it had enacted over the past three or four years were working so fantastically well that it had managed to generate additional funding. Therefore, there are real difficulties with the approach that you suggest not just from a presentational point of view; the money would be a temptation to Governments.

When I was on Glasgow City Council, I looked at rent increases. Every year for 40 years, the lowest rates of increase were in election years and the highest rates were in the year after an election. I do not think that Glasgow was alone in that.

Okay. We have to think about the areas from which we are going to take that money and that is the most difficult decision of all.