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In Perth and Kinross, the SNP-run council has chosen to spend nearly £1 million on a relocation of the council chambers from the top floor to the ground floor of the council headquarters.
After that, we get to misconduct and gross misconduct and—to answer that question about overzealousness—at that top end of the scale, we have had four hearings under the new regs.
I want to move on to other areas of welfare, particularly top-ups, which Stewart Maxwell wants to ask about, but there are two areas that we need to cover first, one of which is the constitutional position surrounding LCMs.
That is a struggle for us to keep on top of. On the claimant’s perspective, an objective of some of the reforms is to simplify the system, but it feels to us that the system is becoming increasingly complex and opaque.
Recruitment becomes harder; retention becomes even harder; and the issue itself therefore becomes harder to solve. On top of that, the risks to both in-hours and out-of-hours services also increase and become very substantial under such circumstances.
In the report, you mentioned a funding reduction of 12 per cent, but in your previous report—two years ago, I think—you mentioned a funding cut of 24 per cent, so we have a 12 per cent cut on top of a 24 per cent cut, which is serious.
It should therefore matter politically, and if further persuasion is needed on that, I point to the mention in the SWT’s briefing of a YouGov poll that found that 85 per cent of people put the issue right at the top of the environmental agenda. The decline in bee numbers is not unique to Scotland or the UK.