Chamber and committees

It does. Of course, someone does not need to be ultra-rich for divergence to affect them. When someone earns just £50,000, there is a 20 per cent differential between the income tax rates. That could affect a much wider range of people.

Ms Stafford, you are director general of the Scottish exchequer. Is it a concern to the Scottish Government that just 16 per cent of Scottish taxpayers form more than 62 per cent of the tax base? As we see in the report on 2018-19, any change in the number of people in the higher bands, or any behavioural change, will have a huge detrimental effect on the amount of money that the Government has to spend.

It was notable that the Scottish Government was quick to comment publicly on the net migration figure. However, over the past 24 hours, various commentators and analysts whom we often rely heavily on for independent, neutral analysis, such as the Institute of Directors, the Fraser of Allander Institute, Scottish Financial Enterprise and a bunch of others, all say that the numbers themselves are quite meaningless if we look only at the net migration figure and that what matters is how much money is coming into the system and how much money has been lost from it.

That goes back to my original question, which I am not sure was answered. If we lose higher-rate and top-rate taxpayers, that will have a much more substantial impact on the amount of money that comes into the system. We do not have a year-by-year analysis of that, and it is very difficult for the committee or anyone else to take a view on that if we do not have the data.

I think that many people would disagree with that. Anecdotally, we are hearing a number of voices being very vocal maybe not necessarily about the statistical analysis of migration, but the quantitative analysis is that every respected industry body says that it is really struggling to recruit people and that tax divergence is the primary cause of that. I hear what you are saying, but business leaders are saying entirely the opposite.

Perhaps you could share your expertise this morning. What are people doing? If there is divergence as a result of either more bands or higher tax rates, what sorts of things do people do? Do they move out of the country? Do they not take pay rises? Do they not do overtime? Do they put more money into their pensions? Is there more tax avoidance or evasion? What are the risks when there is divergence?

You mentioned legal aid. That is clearly an area of dispute between the sector and the Government. The sector has warned that it is on its knees and that we are looking down the barrel at a big black hole in legal representation, which is a worrying perspective from a democratic point of view. There is a discussion about fees, for example. Are you just looking at the monetary value that the Government gives the sector or are you looking at wider issues, such as workforce issues, that may come down the line? We hear anecdotally that the workforce is ageing and there are fewer entrants. What level of detail will you go into when you look at legal aid?

The resource budgets tend to reflect that because many of those bodies have received inflationary pay rises, which has perhaps eaten into some of the resource budget—unexpectedly so, given events of the past few years. However, in relation to other improvements such as digitisation, reforming public services and access to public services, my impression from reading numerous reports in my eight years here is that we seem to be quite slow on the uptake with regard to many of those, and the reason largely given for that is that that usually involves, to a great degree, putting capital investments up front.

Of course, as we know, that is a bone of contention at the moment and many of the spend-to-save projects that may have been mooted in public sector bodies have been put on hold or cancelled altogether. There are numerous examples of that. Does that pose a risk down the line? If we are not spending on capital now to make those necessary digital technological improvements and to improve access to public services, we are simply carrying down the same road of doing things as they are and will end up in five years’ time with very slow, old-fashioned mechanisms and infrastructure.

In the interests of time, I will stop there.

Yes. Progress in negotiations is always subjective.

What work will you be doing on community justice? Your predecessor produced an initial report on the establishment of Community Justice Scotland by the Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016, and the Government published a national strategy for community justice in 2022. Will you respond directly to progress against that strategy?

That is helpful. One of the main issues is the importance of following the money. There are so many stakeholders involved in delivery and they have both statutory and non-statutory duties in delivering community justice. It is difficult to find out where the bigger budget goes except where it is directly attributed to a single agency such as Community Justice Scotland. Our committees have struggled with that for many years in looking at outputs.

As you are aware, we have done a lot of work on the input or use of the private sector in justice. I will not go into that today because there will be other opportunities to look at the use of companies such as Serco and GEOAmey. In the interest of time, I will park the other justice questions for now. As I said, my questions are quite meaty, unfortunately.

You will be pleased to hear that the next area is the national care service. Its establishment has been a matter of controversy both politically and among stakeholders but, moving on from that, I am keen to hear what work Audit Scotland will do in auditing the preparations and, potentially, the implementation, particularly from a financial point of view. That is particularly relevant given that the Finance and Public Administration Committee had grave reservations about the financial memorandum for the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. The matter is of cross-party interest, so I hope that it will feature in your work.

This might be a general worry but, when there is organisational change of this type, and particularly when there is consolidation, we cannot afford to wait a couple of years to see whether things have bedded in and are working. We talked about Police Scotland and the centralisation. You might need to wait five or 10 years to do that piece of work, but care has more immediacy to it because it is a matter of life and death, if you like. There may be a public opinion that we cannot afford to wait four or five years for that analysis.