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Most of the recent cost of living assistance benefits have targeted families with young children—the best start grant and the Scottish child payment, for example—and that has been welcome and right.
Public finance forecasts and economic forecasts are uncertain at the best of times—they are very much an art, not a science—and nobody knows how the next few months will pan out, never mind the next few years.
The inquiry will look in more detail at what is causing those price increases, what can be done to alleviate them and how help can best be given to households that are most in need.
Obviously, the more we get out, the less feedstock there will be for the energy-from-waste industry, which is an issue. The best performance by energy from waste tends to be where there are heat-only plants rather than plants that generate electricity.
Some of them are drawn from international human rights framework best practice and some come from our experience of working against harmful practices in Scotland.
Otherwise, there is a risk of ending up with a large number of groups that are not supported across all parties.I would argue that it is best to leave the arrangements as they stand rather than make changes.
The job of disbursing Short money to political parties will be carried out by the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body, which is duty bound to do so in the best interests of a functioning Parliament and which I understand now carries out its work consensually.
It could have some teething problems. Is the best time to test that when you are likely to have an uplift, albeit a modest uplift, in numbers during the peak travel period, or would it be better to test a system like this in an off-peak period?