Seòmar agus comataidhean

Steven Heddle was one of the commentators at that meeting, and despite the difficulties—do not get me wrong; the meetings can of course be robust—he pointed out that there are important areas that councils want to work with us on and that the Verity house agreement is really important to them.

I can look back to many budget discussions with local government and they do take a bit of a pattern. Local government will ask for X amount of money, there will be some difficult discussions, and then we land where we land. This year is difficult. We could say that it is difficult for the whole of the public sector because there is less money.

Well, I gave the global amount for higher and further education. If you are asking me whether the Scottish Funding Council has reached an agreement on places with universities and colleges, my understanding is that those discussions are on-going.

Let me say a couple of things about that. Clearly, Parliament has taken a lot of interest in closing the poverty-related attainment gap, and it is our firm belief that teachers play a crucial role in our ability to do that. We are investing £1 billion in the Scottish attainment challenge in the current session of Parliament, and we recognise that the teacher workforce is at the heart of that. However, there are other important supports that are provided through schools and other agencies.

You make the point that the position on teacher numbers is not universal across Scotland. What do we do about that? The offer to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has been the education assurance board. We would like to get to what we could describe as a single point of truth on what the teaching workforce needs to look like over the next few years in order for us to get to numbers that more accurately reflect the fact that there are differing positions. The numbers are growing in some areas. Overall, the pupil roll has increased by more than 30,000 over the past decade, so it is not true to say that the overall position is down. However, there is variation across the country.

Establishing that board and being able to look at the actual workforce numbers that are required will enable us to align more closely with what is required in order to maintain teacher numbers in the right areas. That is the key missing bit for us. That board needs to be established and that work needs to be taken forward.

We ask the enterprise agencies to do a lot of different things, which struck me when business leaders whom I spoke to talked about a six-page letter that had gone to one of our enterprise agencies, asking them about the things that the Scottish Government asks them to do. We need to be more focused on and sharper about what the priorities are, particularly in the next year and the immediate future.

To be blunt, the discussions that we are having around health, police and fire services are pretty limited, which you can see if you look at the budget lines for front-line services. That is probably because, in terms of where the money is going, I have focused on and prioritised front-line public services. That has meant really difficult budget decisions elsewhere to make the budget stack up. Is that what I would want to have done in an ideal world? No, but given that money is tight, we have had to prioritise front-line public spending. That has meant that we have had to constrain funding elsewhere, and it means that our enterprise agencies will have to utilise that £307 million in a careful and targeted way to align to the priorities.

There are, in the budget, elements of committed funding for our priorities—for offshore wind, for example—and elements where we have made additional investments. However, it is a tough budget for our enterprise agencies. There is no getting away from that, and we have to be clear about what we are asking them to do with that money.

There is nothing different this year.

On that point, I note that the education secretary will, no doubt, be asked questions in Parliament about the number of teachers—

It was spring of last year when the final agreement with the Scottish Funding Council was reached. There is nothing different at all this year with regard to those discussions with the Scottish Funding Council: it was spring last year and it will be spring this year.

I am happy to schedule that debate, but we need to see the spring budget first. My suggestion is that we consider the matter alongside the medium-term financial strategy, which has that longer-term outlook, but I agree that we need to go beyond that in looking at some of the pressures, such as social security.

I have no issues with scheduling that debate but it needs to be done in a helpful way, which looks beyond the day-to-day debates that we have with one another in the Parliament about spending on this or that area. I would welcome the ability to look beyond some of those day-to-day debates. I am happy to commit to the time for that debate, but let us make sure that we are in full command of all the information that we need and have it in front of us, which will be beyond the spring budget. The offer is to have such a debate around the time of the medium-term financial strategy, if that is helpful.

That is why it is important that we look at the HMRC data. In some ways, we will need to track whether there is behavioural change from year to year. We cannot foresee what effect a tax policy intervention will have in five or 10 years, because the data on behavioural change—if that is what we are talking about—will only emerge as and when it emerges. That is why the HMRC data is important.

There will also be National Records of Scotland data on migration. At the moment, we have positive in-migration of around 7,000 people a year in the working-age population, and we will keep a close eye on whether there is a shift in that. Inevitably, the data is not forward looking because data, by its nature, looks back on what has happened. It is important that we continue to look at the trends. If there is a change in trend that indicates that there is a different direction of travel, we would want to look at that very carefully.

The business community will give its view, as a community. As individuals, I am sure that there are business leaders who believe in progressive taxation—I have no doubt about that, at all. The business community will represent itself in terms of wanting lower taxes for its businesses—I have no doubt about that—and it will make those representations, whether they are about business taxes or VAT.

However, as a Government, we have a judgment to make about how we fund public services. If we reduce taxes for business—or, indeed, income tax—that means that there is less money for public services. That is the balance and those are the decisions that governments have to make, and we have decided to invest in public services through the tax decisions that we have made, whether on income tax or business taxes.