Chamber and committees

Liz Smith is absolutely right that there is a much wider—and, I would suggest, multifaceted—challenge here. The core issue is that there are far more public bodies in Scotland now than there were in 1999, but the Parliament’s ability—or its capacity—to scrutinise and hold them to account has not changed in that time. As a Parliament, we need to look at how we adapt and reform ourselves to ensure that we are fully discharging our responsibilities across a range of organisations, particularly those that are appointed by Parliament—that is, bodies appointed by the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. However, we will come to that debate later on.

Part of my motivation for lodging amendment 60—and I understand the challenges that John Mason has raised with me—

Yes—some of them.

I have a few questions that have not been covered, although the first one is on disability prevalence, which goes back to our earlier discussion. I understand entirely the difficulty with making presumptions about changes. However, as the convener pointed out, we have already seen a significant increase in disability in the past two decades or so. To what extent have you looked into what is underlying that? Have more people been disabled?

Covid would be the obvious reason. As a result of the pandemic, more people are now disabled because of long Covid. The other story, which we have touched on, is mental health. A lot of people were disabled but had not been diagnosed or recognised. Depending on which of those it is, that has a significant economic effect, particularly on productivity. A lot of people in the workforce were disabled but were not diagnosed or recognised and therefore were not receiving support, so they were probably less productive than they otherwise would have been.

There are two potentials there. If the rate continues to increase because we are diagnosing existing disabilities, we could increase productivity by providing people with the support that they need. Alternatively, if people are becoming more disabled than they were previously, productivity could go in the opposite direction. Have you looked into what the underlying data suggests about the past 20 years?

Thank you.

I accept all of that. My question arises out of a frustration about some issues—to be fair, they are more about ADS than about LBTT. Some are related to catching people who are in the process of family separation or divorce. I have also written to you about disabled people and someone else purchasing a home on their behalf, and we have talked about that. Those issues have been around for a while. The review was a good few years ago—maybe four years ago. It feels as though we are dealing with the issues in a fragmented manner, rather than taking a holistic approach in which we look at all the anomalies across the system, collectively agree that nobody ever intended those to be the case, and then set out how we will address them.

I have had correspondence from people who have been caught by various anomalies and who find it hard to get an understanding of the Government’s approach to dealing with those. I have heard from people who feel that the anomaly they were caught by is something that the Government indicated a few years ago that it was going to address but that that has still not happened. They find it hard—as do I—even to get an understanding of a timeline from the Government about how it is addressing all those issues.

Good afternoon, minister. My question is not on the specific issue; it is about the wider approach to dealing with anomalies in the additional dwelling supplement and LBTT. Is the way that we have been going about that not a bit fragmented? I recognise what you say about amendments being out of scope for bills. However, we have had the ADS review work by your predecessor, Tom Arthur, which dealt with some anomalies, and there is wider LBTT review work under way, so it feels as though we are dealing with this piecemeal. We could have recognised a few years ago that there are a variety of anomalies that everybody agrees need to be resolved, and we could have taken a more holistic approach to addressing all of those across LBTT and ADS.

Thank you.

It is particularly relevant at the moment, given that the UK Government has framed the changes and cuts to the personal independence payment as being about getting people back into work, when that payment is not premised on people being out of work. Indeed, a lot of people who have PIP are already in work; it cannot get people into work if they are already there. If they are not there, it is not necessarily for reasons related to that payment. That UK Government decision has an effect on Scotland’s public finance decisions on social security, as you say.

My final question is about the extent to which you looked into the urban-rural divide, because I did not see that issue coming out in the report as much as I expected it to come out. We have talked about depopulation, which is a much sharper issue in rural parts of Scotland. It is also more of a west coast issue, so it affects some urban communities on the west coast—Inverclyde is probably the area that is worst affected—but, in general, depopulation is a much sharper issue in rural areas than it is in urban areas.

The provision of health and social care in rural areas is already more expensive. Depopulation makes the situation harder, because it is generally working-age people who are leaving, so it becomes harder to provide social care packages and so on. However, we are probably heading towards a tipping point at which depopulation in rural areas will also start to involve older people, because they will simply have to move to get the care that they need. We should not be getting to that point—it is not a good thing. How much does that issue factor into your thinking?

At the moment, depopulation is pushing up the cost of health and social care provision in rural areas, because working-age people are leaving. However, if we reach the tipping point at which older people, who are more in need of those services, are forced to leave—I am not saying that that will be a good thing, because it will not—that will bring down the cost of provision, because people will have to move to urban areas where provision exists.

I am particularly grateful to Martin Whitfield for making that point and clarifying that we want to hear from young people who may not be taking a qualifications Scotland qualification. On that basis, I would be happy to support his amendment 226 if he moves it at this stage, but it would be helpful if he could acknowledge that if both my amendment 119 and his amendment 226 are agreed to, we will need to do a little bit of reconciliation to tidy things up at stage 3.

The primary intention of the wording that the Government and I landed on in amendment 119—

“young people who are undertaking, or have recent experience of undertaking”—

qualifications, was, as I mentioned earlier, to ensure that we do not disqualify a young person as soon as they have completed their course. The experience of a young person who has, for example, just finished high school is really valuable: having been all the way through the process, they can reflect back on it—that is a voice that we want to hear.

Does Martin Whitfield appreciate that point and recognise that, if we agree to amendments 119, 120 and 226, we will need to do a little bit of tidying up to capture both of the points that we are getting at? The requirement does not necessarily need to be for the young people to be currently undertaking the qualifications, because those who are not undertaking any qualifications are a particularly important marginalised group who we need to hear from, but we do not want to exclude those who have already undertaken a qualification, such as school leavers.