Chamber and committees

That is not what I was planning to ask about, but I wanted to follow up on a previous comment. I will condense this question a bit.

The Fiscal Commission did an excellent piece of work on the cost of climate mitigation and adaptation. The Climate Ready Clyde group, which includes the greater Glasgow local authorities, Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the University of Glasgow, did an excellent report a couple of years ago, which projected that the cost of climate breakdown—not the efforts that we are taking to reduce emissions but the impact that is already locked in—will be something in the region of £400 million a year by 2040 in the greater Glasgow area.

Does the Government have any figures? Have you come to any conclusion on what the cost of adaptation will be? That cost is entirely separate from the record amount of money that is going into mitigation—the £4.9 billion of climate-positive spending is excellent. Does the Government have a ballpark figure that it is planning around in relation to the locked-in damage that will already be done?

Housing and energy being ideal for that, as the returns are very stable.

Thank you.

I accept the point about certainty, but the review is now three years old. We all agree on the importance of supporting small businesses in Scotland. The overwhelming majority of businesses in Scotland are small. However, if the primary concern is that businesses require certainty, surely the Government has had the opportunity over the past couple of years to enter into a discussion with the small business community about how it thinks that a quarter of a billion pounds would be best spent to support it, and to ensure that any change is brought in over a longer period of time so that there is certainty and businesses can plan around it.

I find such a striking juxtaposition between, on the one hand, your remarks about getting best value for money and what is said in the medium-term financial strategy and, on the other, reviews being commissioned, coming back with what I think are useful but challenging conclusions, and then just being discarded. It would be one thing for the Government to say, “We will deal with this over a longer period of time because any snap changes in tax regimes can cause disruption,” but that is not what happened. It was just discarded, because politically it was hard.

Good morning, cabinet secretary. I will say something before I get on to my line of questioning.

It is hard to take seriously the Government’s claim that it is trying to get best value for money on spend when independent reviews of existing Government policies are rightly commissioned but then discarded when the conclusions are politically inconvenient. We have discussed the small business bonus scheme before. There are clearly better ways to spend a quarter of a billion pounds to support small businesses. The Government commissioned a review, and the review said that no action has been taken in response.

How do you expect us to take seriously the Government’s claim that it is trying to get best value for money when one of the most notable examples of a policy review—and it was great that the Government was willing to commission that independent review—was simply discarded because it was clearly politically inconvenient?

That would be really useful.

I will bundle up where I have been going with these questions. The Climate Ready Clyde report that I mentioned was produced largely by the university but for the local authorities. Part of what the local authorities were trying to get at was their belief, which I share, that they need more fiscal autonomy to deal with the consequences of climate change. Obviously, extreme weather will do a lot of the damage to infrastructure for which councils are responsible.

We have discussed council tax reform at length previously, so I will not get into that, but I would be interested in the Scottish Government’s position in principle on the extent to which local authorities are able to raise their own revenue. At the moment, council tax is about 20 per cent of local authority budgets; non-domestic rates are nominally a local tax but, in practice, they are not—councils have almost no discretion over them whatsoever. Does the Scottish Government think that the current balance is right, or would you like to see local authorities raise a far greater share of their budgets directly?

The norm across Europe is that municipalities raise a majority of their own budgets; Scotland is an outlier in that regard. Does the Government have a direction of travel with regard to the degree of fiscal autonomy that you want councils to have? Should they be raising the majority of their budgets themselves?

I would strongly support that. If you can provide the committee with further detail on the Government’s engagement with the councils on pension funds being used for capital investment, in particular, I would certainly find that beneficial, and I imagine that other members would, too.

I have no further supplementary questions. That covers it.

Absolutely. That was really useful.

Perhaps I can press you just a bit further. I have sat on this and similar committees for nine years now and, in that time, really compelling cases have been made to us for all the things that teachers need to be trained in but which they are not being trained in. A couple of times in that period, the committee has done inquiries on initial teacher education, and it has, quite often, come to the same conclusion that, with the best will in the world, and even with a full four-year degree course rather than the one-year postgraduate diploma in education, teachers cannot be trained in absolutely everything.

We are coming to the point that half of all children in Scotland have some kind of additional support need. I am not saying that they are all complex needs—they can vary from their being exceptionally gifted or having English as a second language to the kind of complex needs that your daughter has. Some of the feedback that we get is that, realistically, not every teacher can be trained in everything, and what is really needed is more specialist staff in schools. In your view, what is the balance between trying to train every classroom teacher and every classroom assistant and having more specialist staff on hand in every school?

That is really useful—thank you.