Chamber and committees

Good morning. My questions are primarily related to the impact on teachers’ terms and conditions. Tara Lillis, you have covered that quite comprehensively already, but could you clarify whether it is the position of the NASUWT that, were the bill to be passed and the obligation to provide outdoor residential education were to be delivered in the typical way, through teachers volunteering their time, that would end up going to the SNCT for a formal discussion about changes to terms and conditions?

I have no doubt that that is true. When I am not here in the Parliament, I am a youth worker, and plenty of the young people I have worked with have had excellent experiences of outdoor education.

A cynical or pessimistic approach to what will happen if we pass the bill might suggest that we could create a capacity issue by significantly increasing demand. At the moment, schools can be somewhat selective and go to a centre that they know they will be happy with. If schools are obligated to go somewhere and there are capacity issues in the system, their options may be limited and they may, therefore, end up not being completely satisfied that the place they go to will have positive outcomes. What systems do we need to have in place to prevent that? If we increase demand, capacity will have to be created to meet that demand, and we will need to ensure that the capacity of the new, expanded system matches the standards that I have no doubt you are all meeting at the moment, if that makes sense.

You mentioned that the support does not have to be provided by teachers in the typical manner that I think that we are all familiar with. Andrew Bradshaw, I am interested in anything that you can add to the discussion in terms of what alternative models look like. Are there areas of best practice that exist already? Are there any local authorities that use a model that is not typically reliant on teachers volunteering to go away with their class for the week?

Thanks—that was useful. Tara Lillis covered the core questions around terms and conditions when she responded to Bill Kidd, so I do not need to repeat the question.

I sympathise with the Government on public sector pay, because the moment that any figure is published, that figure becomes the floor for negotiations from the union negotiator side. There is no winning when it comes to transparently setting out public sector pay in a way that does not undermine negotiations or make them more difficult.

Michael Marra mentioned some of the specific cuts that have been made, such as to the nature restoration fund, which you referred to in your response to Michelle Thomson. Is it still the Government’s position that there is no way to press ahead with some of those very small pots, such as the £1 million for the nature restoration fund—although a larger figure of £5 million has been mentioned—and the £2 million for the asylum seeker bus travel scheme had it proceeded?

If we take asylum seeker bus travel as the clearest example, the Parliament has now voted that that should still go ahead. Your group and the Government were part of that vote. We are heading towards the end of the financial year, so it would not even be possible to spend £2 million at this point, but allocating something—£1 million or £0.5 million—would allow the project to get under way, with the intention of funding it fully and delivering it from the subsequent financial year. Is there really no scope to allocate back in the region of £1 million or £0.5 million?

With respect, that is not an answer to the question that I asked. It is clear that, year on year, the education portfolio has borne quite a bit of the burden, in cash terms and as a percentage of its overall budget. Does the Government recognise that, when certain portfolios bear the burden year after year, that eventually has a disproportionate effect?

I will stick with that theme for a minute. Is there an argument to do this the other way around? Could you set a budget that balances, recognising all the pressures in the first place? I totally take your point that that would involve saying at the outset, “Here is what we will have to cut to make that balance”, but as part of the budget, you could publish what are essentially scenario plans, which specify, if the Government receives X amount of in-year consequentials, where the cuts will be reversed and to which areas additional spending will be allocated. You could lay out the whole range of assumptions that you are making—you said that £1.4 billion was towards the upper end of the range.

There is a value-for-money point here, in that starting a process and then making cuts in-year does not only result in some people losing their jobs in-year, which is bad enough, but it represents low value for money. Projects are incomplete and you have to reinvent the wheel and restart again six months later when the projects get money reallocated in the next financial year, in the hope that they will get it for that whole year and not just for six months, with a cut to follow. Would it not be easier to start off with a balanced budget and scenario plans that show, if you get that money in June, September or October, where it will go and how you will ensure that it provides value for money, even though it is only coming into the system in-year?

Finally, I want to return to public sector pay. One of the more substantial lines in the revision is for the teacher pay settlement. That creates a wider issue. I recognise the difficulties in allocating ahead for pay negotiations that have not been completed—I mentioned that a moment ago—but to what extent does the Government look at the year-on-year cumulative impact of the path-to-balance exercises? I have previously posed that question to the cabinet secretary and to the permanent secretary. I apologise if I have also posed it to you and all the conversations are just blurring together in my mind, but I would be interested in your perspective on that.

The issue applies particularly to the health and education portfolios, although, because health is so vast, it is a bit easier for it to absorb the changes. My concern is about the education portfolio, which, over the past three years of budget revisions, has taken a disproportionate share of the burden. You could argue that the current change is ultimately to transfer money to local government to pay teachers, but plenty of money beyond the teacher pay settlement has come out of the learning budget, for example. When the Government is making such decisions each year, does it look back at the trend over previous years and at whether certain budgets are beginning to bear a disproportionate burden?

I will rephrase it then. Is there a recognition that the education portfolio has had to bear quite a lot of the revisions, year on year?

I will have a final crack at it. I recognise the Government’s ambition for the next in-year budget revision to be far smaller than it has been in the past couple of years but, when we get there, will you start by looking back at the effect that the previous rounds of in-year revisions and their baselining into future years has had on portfolios, before then looking at which portfolios to take from to achieve balance?