Chamber and committees

How do we strike the right balance and resolve the tension between what we have all signed up for with regard to focusing much more on outcomes rather than inputs and the reality that significant importance will always be placed on the amount of money that we put into the system? Inevitably, there will be political debates about where that money is prioritised. In this case, the outcomes for young people who have diagnosed additional support needs are the most important thing for us to measure. However, we can still tell quite a lot from looking at the amount of money that we are putting into the system and where it is going, and then tracking that against the outcomes.

How does the Government balance those things in areas such as ASN, particularly given the inconsistency in the data? Ultimately, you cannot set a budget based on outcomes; the budget needs to explain how much money will go to X, Y and Z.

I completely appreciate the difficulties that the sector is under and that it is a question of survival for some businesses, but this is very literally a question of survival for those workers who are being paid a poverty wage.

Part of the challenge for us as a committee and for the Parliament overall is that really compelling asks are made of us for further expansion of the social security system. There is no reason why, in a country as rich as this, one in five children should be in poverty; we have spent £450 million-ish on the Scottish child payment to lift 90,000 children out of poverty, but there are hundreds of thousands more children whom we could lift out of poverty if we spent more money on that.

That money needs to come from somewhere, and it comes largely from tax. Income tax is the biggest tax lever that we have, but the fact is that, relative to the UK as a whole—and certainly to London and the south-east—Scotland is a low-wage economy. As a result, one of the ways in which we can tackle poverty directly at source while raising additional tax revenue that we can spend on direct interventions is by boosting wages.

However, what I am seeing are challenges when I look at, say, the media coverage the Government floating the idea of potential additional conditionality to existing non-domestic rates relief with regard to the living wage—I believe that that was off the back of a question asked by Liz Smith and answered by Tom Arthur. I saw comments in the press yesterday and today from the Scottish Hospitality Group objecting to such a move, and I am really struggling to square the circle of business sectors coming to Parliament and making a perfectly compelling and legitimate case for more spending or tax relief in their areas without being willing to accept the conditions that I think could be reasonably associated with that, not just to tackle the wider structural issues in our economy but to have a very direct impact on people’s lives. Should it not be a straightforward case of saying, “Yeah, you know what—we do want additional tax relief but we are willing to take additional conditions alongside that to play our parts in driving up wages”?

We could do with more 25-year-olds in Parliament as well.

In the first instance, I am interested in some of the questions around the small business bonus scheme. Rachel Cook, I am interested in your point of view on that. Is there not a credibility issue with the small business bonus scheme, in so far as it is not just small businesses that get it? Shooting estates, which are owned in tax havens and by billionaires, are receiving a tax relief that is, at least in terms of its name, supposed to be for small businesses. Every year, £5 million to £10 million of small business bonus scheme relief goes to shooting estates. Surely the FSB agrees that there needs to be some reform of the system, so that a tax relief that is designed for small businesses goes only to small businesses.

On the point about looking at the wider picture and not seeing this as a trade-off between the two things that you mentioned, I take it that you will accept that low wages—or wages below the real living wage—have a cost not just to the public purse but to the wider economy, given that a worker earning below the living wage is not going to have much discretionary spending power. They will not have much to spend on fish and chips on a Friday night.

Thank you—that was useful. You also mentioned the visitor levy as an example of additional regulation. Is your issue about how it is implemented rather than the principle of the levy, or is the FSB opposed to any visitor levy at all?

But why should tips be included? Workers receive tips directly at the discretion of customers; it is the employer’s responsibility to ensure that staff are, in this case, directly paid a wage that they can at least live on. Administratively speaking, I cannot see how you can bring tips into this, but regardless of that, I cannot see why you would do so as a matter of principle, either. Surely if a business is going to pay its staff at least a liveable wage, it is on that business to do so without relying on the discretion of customers.

Thank you very much.

Louise Maclean, you mentioned that the Signature Group’s minimum wage is about £13 or £15 an hour, which sounds really positive. I assume that that is a starting salary, whatever the age of the worker. As I think you mentioned in your evidence just a moment ago, your written submission includes an argument that additional non-domestic rates relief for the sector would be effective in terms of tackling poverty and low pay. I assume that the Scottish Hospitality Group would be relaxed if an additional relief was brought in, which was conditional on businesses paying at least the real living wage, regardless of age.

You have made a very compelling case, for the benefit of the Signature Group’s vacancies page, to anybody who is watching and considering a role in hospitality.

I have a couple of other questions, convener, but I am conscious of the time.

Just so I am completely clear, is the issue at the moment that we are not clear exactly what the barriers in the procurement system are to SMEs—although we can all probably guess and we have plenty of anecdotal evidence—and that, therefore, we need to do that basic data collection first before we come up with policy proposals?