Chamber and committees

That had been on-going and, of course, discussions were live and on-going, too, as is normal in such scenarios. However, the Scottish Government has a duty in this respect. It was not unfortunate, or regrettable, that no accountable officer was appointed; it went against statutory requirements not to appoint one. It was in breach of the manual.

Did you get the impression that they just did not want you back? I am sorry to be so direct, but I think that that is the only way in which we will get to the bottom of this.

Okay. I will move on, because I think that there is a wider issue here. From all that I have been hearing in our evidence sessions, it strikes me that there is what sounds like an absolutely horrific culture at the very top of a large public body that is publicly funded and that receives huge amounts of public cash. Indeed, it also has a huge responsibility with regard to our historic and cultural sector, and we all want it to succeed. However, we have just heard, in that extraordinary exchange, that six or seven senior directors of the organisation were unwilling, or unfit, to step up to take it over on a short-term basis. There have been on-going issues between the board and the chief executive, and, as far as I know, live proceedings might be under way in that respect—I do not know. This does not point to a happy ship in any way, shape or form. What on earth has the Scottish Government been doing for the last year?

Good.

11:45

Apologies for the noise; it has nearly finished—it is not my stomach, although I have not had my breakfast.

Mr Davies, I appreciate that you will log off at quarter past 10, so I will start my line of questioning with you before aiming my other questions at the Auditor General.

One of the issues that came up last year—it comes up recurrently—is how complex it is for the Parliament as well as the Government to work out how much the Government can expect to receive from its tax policies versus how much it actually gets when the outturn is delivered. It is also complex to figure out whether those policies are producing, over a period of time, the levels of income that the Government thinks are required for its spending decisions.

So much of that is based on estimates and assumptions that are made by various bodies, including HMRC, the SFC and others. How do we get to a position of relying less on estimates and assumptions and instead get more accurate forecasting so that the Government has a better idea of how much its policies will raise financially?

When we talked about this last year, the convener said that, for every £5 that is raised through additional tax, only £1 finds its way to the Scottish budget. You replied that that was correct. The figures that we have looked at today—£1.7 billion returning £600 million—would suggest that the situation has improved somewhat. For every £5, we are now looking at about £1.80, so it is heading in the right direction. However, are we ever going to get to a stage where, for every £5 raised, £5 is available to spend, or is that an impossible scenario?

As you mentioned earlier, part of that is the Government being open and transparent about those numbers. I will give you some examples. This week, my office has been doing research on comments or statements made by the Government, including the First Minister, cabinet secretaries and other ministers, which found that the higher figure of £1.7 billion is often used by the Government as an example to justify its policy decisions. I am not asking for any comment on the policy decisions, but, when these issues are discussed, it is only ever the higher figure that is mentioned. When they are talking about how much money tax actually produces for the Government to spend, they very rarely use the lower number. Do you think that the Government ought to use both figures, for example, when talking about tax divergence?

Thank you—that is very helpful.

I will briefly revert to a previous line of questioning about identifying the volume of taxpayers in certain tax brackets. We know that, due to Scotland’s population, there is a smaller number of people who pay the top rates of income tax. However, 18 per cent of taxpayers pay more than 65 per cent of all tax, so they are an extremely important group of taxpayers. I find it odd that no one can answer the question of how many taxpayers in Scotland earn more than £100,000, £200,000, £250,000 or £500,000, given how much tax they pay. It is a relatively small group of people—you could probably fit them in this room. How do we get that sort of data? It would only take one or two of them to exit the tax system in Scotland for us to have a problem.

That is very helpful. Thank you. You will be pleased to know that I will leave you in peace now, Mr Davies.

The problem relates to how the public can scrutinise those figures when ministers only ever quote one of the numbers. The example that I have is probably the worst case of it. The First Minister said that

“According to the Scottish Fiscal Commission, the policy choices that we have made will raise up to an additional £1.7 billion in this financial year”,—[Official Report, 22 May 2025; c 20.]

and that that would “help to pay for” a long list of things that he went on to say.

The general public would be listening to that and saying, “'Fine—I may not necessarily agree with tax divergence decisions made by the Government, but it raises £1.7 billion to spend on all these free things that we apparently get.” However, we know that that is not the case. Unless both numbers are quoted by senior members of Government, the public will have no idea how accurate they are or whether they are relevant to the conversation.