Seòmar agus comataidhean

I will come back to you on that. At the moment, we are in the midst of working through the carbon budgets and the climate plan and trying to align all that against a difficult fiscal backdrop. You are right to challenge the elements that are related to adaptation and mitigation; the question is how we pay for them. It cannot all come from the public purse, because there is just not enough funding.

We must consider how we lever in private sector investment and incentivise it. Let us take the example of district heating systems. Clearly, the financial model can work; we just need to push forward with it. It can be frustrating and slow to do so, but there is a financial model that can work, which uses the public sector to oil the wheels and private sector investment to put in place the infrastructure. We need to get better at identifying the issues and how we can lever in private finance and decarbonisation more generally, because we will not be able to fund it all through the public purse.

I will explore the overall cost with climate colleagues and come back to you on that.

This answer is at a very high level—I am not going to get into percentages—but I am keen to empower local government to raise more funds. Obviously, that will have to be done in a responsible way.

Councils do have borrowing powers; actually, they have more borrowing powers than the Scottish Government—

—but some are more at the limit of those powers than others.

There are certain approaches that we are exploring in the space of outcomes-based funding, and the one that is most advanced is the Granton housing project in Edinburgh, which also has an active travel and decarbonisation element. There are opportunities for individual local authorities to do more of that.

There is also the question of the local government pension fund, which is sitting at about £67 billion or £68 billion, and the strategic use of that investment, which local government is keen to discuss. Housing has been suggested as an obvious opportunity in that respect, but there could also be opportunities for infrastructure projects such as those for mitigating climate issues, for example, as well as other big decarbonisation and district heating projects. We need to explore whether more can be done in that space.

Clearly, any such models must have a return on investment—

Housing and energy are good examples, I think. There is more that we can discuss in that space.

And we are trying to do it as a devolved nation.

Yes, that is progressing. We have a new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and I have not had a chance to raise it with him. I have had a very short introductory meeting with him, during which I had to raise certain things. I am getting a list of things together to talk to him about at the finance interministerial standing committee.

I have actually just been given an update here. We have agreed with CST to apply a bespoke arrangement to set the baseline for the block grant adjustment for the aggregates tax. We will use the outturn for the year of the tax’s introduction, which is 2026-27. That will ensure compatibility between the Scottish aggregates tax and the UK aggregates levy and avoid distortions in year 1 revenues.

I had not realised that—progress has been made beyond what I had understood.

I will ask my official, Lucy O’Carroll, to come in on ADT.

In practice, it would be highly unlikely that we would move forward with that under the current arrangements. I have said that before. I will have a look at the wording but, for the avoidance of doubt, it is neither our intention, nor that of the UK Government, to move forward with that because of the inability to resolve the risks. If the wording does not properly reflect that, we will have a look at it.

We will set out the position on that at the budget, but I have pointed to the framework and the principles around that.

When the Scottish child payment was introduced, it was important that we were able to get agreement from the UK Government Department for Work and Pensions that there would be no erosion of the support that people were receiving elsewhere—it had to be additionality. All the evidence points to that payment being the single most important intervention to ensure that Scotland has falling rates of child poverty compared to those anywhere else in the UK. There is cross-party support and understanding of that.

It is important that there are no cliff edges. For example, I am thinking about calls to increase the Scottish child payment. There is a balance to be struck there. As long as the payment continues to increase with inflation, I think that it is at about the right level. It is one of the pillars of support, but getting people into work is the best route out of poverty. We need to make sure that the Scottish child payment continues to lift children out of poverty, I think that it is at about the right level to do that.

If it were much higher, there would be a question about whether it would become a barrier to work. However, I do not believe that there is evidence to suggest that it is a barrier at present.