Chamber and committees

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the 14th meeting of the Public Audit Committee in 2022. Under the first item on our agenda do we agree to take items 4, 5 and 6 in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Thanks, Mr Simpson. I appreciate that pointer.

I thank all the members who have participated in this evidence session. I also thank the witnesses—the Auditor General, Rebecca Seidel and Lucy Nutley. Thank you very much for your co-operation and openness about the section 22 audit report that you have been required to produce. We will consider our next steps in relation to pursuing our interest in what, by all accounts—including appendix 1 of the report—looks very much like a public institution that has been in crisis.

I now suspend the meeting to allow a changeover of witnesses to take place.

Agenda item 3 is on the administration of Scottish income tax. We took evidence on 3 February on the reports that we had received from Audit Scotland and the National Audit Office. We want to explore further some of the implications of the reports, and we have a series of questions on them.

I welcome our witnesses. Alyson Stafford is director general of the Scottish exchequer, Fiona Thom is head of the income tax and reserved taxes unit at the Scottish Government, Jonathan Athow is director general for customer strategy and tax design at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, and Jackie McGeehan is deputy director for income tax policy at HMRC. You are all very welcome.

I invite Alyson Stafford to make a short opening statement. We will then proceed to ask a series of questions.

Thank you, but we are still not clear about whether the NAO is included.

Does it use the NAO’s estimate as part of its deliberations?

I understand that you are compliant with the requirements that are placed on you by legislation but, as the director general of the Scottish exchequer, would it not make sense for you to at least take into account the National Audit Office’s estimates of future tax take?

Does that include the NAO’s estimate?

Thank you for that illuminating response, which was helpful and will inform our future evidence-taking sessions with the principal people from the college.

I know that Graham Simpson is anxious to come in, but before I call him, I want to ask about ownership of the governance improvement plan, which you have identified as an issue in the report, and particularly the role of the Lanarkshire board and the Scottish Funding Council. What is your understanding of the role that those bodies will play in monitoring the progress of implementation of the governance improvement plan that has been agreed?

That raises wider policy implications that are not necessarily for us to pick up but which are of interest to us as MSPs.

My final question relates to paragraph 24, which talks about “additional costs” incurred by the college in its attempts to understand the situation and to plan for improvements to the governance structure. Do you expect further additional costs to arise as a result of the improvement plan that has been agreed to?

On the cabinet secretary’s points, if a compensation scheme would be so divisive and so difficult to do, how does he think that Boris Johnson will be able to do it? Secondly, he mentioned the independent review; it is clear that the Scott report was silent on such a scheme because it was not within its remit to consider that.

Among those who are attending today is Professor Jim Phillips from the University of Glasgow, who provided advice to the Scott review. He is in favour of a compensation scheme. We know that Dennis Canavan, who was a member of the Scott review, is in favour of a compensation scheme, and as I alluded to earlier, the NUM is in favour of a compensation scheme. They see this as an opportunity for the Parliament to lead the way, not to be divisive, and I ask the cabinet secretary and members of the committee to think on that.

In his earlier remarks, the cabinet secretary said that, as a student at the University of Dundee, he was in favour of the miners. I ask him to reflect on what that student would think of him now, 38 years later, as the cabinet secretary who has the ability to financially redress the wrongs of that era. Surely the younger Keith Brown would have looked to the older Keith Brown to take decisive action and to go beyond the symbolic pardon in the bill.

I am accused by some people of wanting to go beyond the intentions of the bill. I am guilty as charged, because I want the bill to have not just a symbolic effect, but a moral effect, a practical effect, a financial effect and a meaningful effect. That is what the Parliament should be aspiring to do, and that is what amendment 16 is intended to do.

I say to Fulton MacGregor and others, as I said in the stage 1 debate,

“If not now, when? If not us, who?”—[Official Report, 31 March 2022; c 94.]

The cabinet secretary brought a degree of party politics into the discussion. I am reminded that, over the past few weeks, the First Minister has been riding round Scotland on a campaign bus with a message on the side about sending a message to Boris. In a press interview, she said:

“this election is an opportunity for people to send a message to Boris Johnson that they find his behaviour and response completely unacceptable.”

The First Minister has previously said of the Prime Minister, to whom the cabinet secretary is now looking to provide a compensation scheme,

“the truth is a disposable commodity”.

She has called him “corrupt” and a “liar”, yet that is who the cabinet secretary is expecting the Parliament to vest its faith in. More than that, that is who the cabinet secretary is asking the former miners, miners’ families and mining communities to vest their faith in. I do not think that that is a credible argument to pursue.

The cabinet secretary mentioned other schemes that have been put in place. These days, I take an interest in financial and audit matters much more than I did previously. There is a note in the annual accounts of the Scottish Government about redress for survivors of historical child abuse cases. The Redress for Survivors (Historical Child Abuse in Care) (Scotland) Act 2021 was passed in March 2021 and received royal assent on 23 April 2021. The note in the accounts says that Redress Scotland

“will consider applications and make determinations, which may include an offer of a redress payment to be made by the Scottish Government. It is not possible to determine the number of applicants or the level of payments likely to be made under the scheme.”

Therefore, it seems perfectly reasonable that we can agree to the principle of a scheme without getting to the point of being able to determine the number of applicants or even the level of the payments that are likely to be made.

I will finish on this point. We have an opportunity before us to set an example and—to borrow the words of the NUM—to “lead the way”. We can be a beacon for the rest of the UK. We can take what I believe is an historic opportunity. The strike ended 37 years ago, and all the pits have long since closed. For new generations, this might seem like old history, but for those of us who lived through it in coalfield communities, as I did, who were part of miners support groups and who saw all the strife, unrest and difficulties that those communities faced, and the hardships that were inflicted on people by the justice system, those memories will stay with us. That is why now is the time to open up dialogue and discussion about the establishment of a compensation scheme for the miners and their families. [Applause.]