Seòmar agus comataidhean

Lastly, will the decision to stop incarcerating young people in young offenders institutions make a significant contribution to resolving that issue?

Is strengthening compulsory purchase powers part of the equation? That is for Ailsa Raeburn.

As I have listened to the evidence this morning, I have sometimes wished that I could transport us back 40 years so that the decision makers back then, who embarked on a process of selling off 500,000 houses in Scotland, could see the impact of that. All your discussions around the table are about that crisis—about building more homes in Scotland and making them available.

One of the elephants in the room, as we all know, is the huge cut in the capital budget, which would otherwise allow us to recover the housing position slightly, or even get close to the targets that we all seek. There is quite a bit of ingenuity spread around the table, and it is great to hear that, but do you think that the range of ingenuity in different areas will be sufficient to get us to where we need to be? We have talked about funds to reacquire empty properties—as Pam Gosal mentioned, the First Minister announced an extra £80 million for that. Last year, the acquisition programme was introduced with £60 million and it bought back 1,000 properties at a relatively low cost.

Earlier, Ronnie MacRae told us about the cost of constructing a new house, but there are other ways of trying to address the problem. Will the range of different measures that are available to us be sufficient to get us to where we want to be? For example, Mike Staples mentioned that the council tax supplement in Dumfries and Galloway is helping to put funding in a certain place, which helps to build up numbers. You have also all mentioned long-term voids and second homes, which you have all mentioned. Russel, I am prepared to bet that many of those former council houses in Gatehouse of Fleet are now second homes. Do we need to be more innovative about the measures that we can deploy to try to improve the situation? Perhaps Russel Griggs can start.

Thank you for those helpful and interesting answers to some of the points that I raised.

The issue of land availability has been mentioned. There seem to be differences in that regard between the situation in the south of Scotland and the situation in the north of Scotland. I invite our witnesses to comment further on those differences and their impacts.

Lastly, what more can we do to tackle the empty houses issue? Russel, you told us that 30 per cent of the housing in Gatehouse of Fleet is second homes. I presume that most of those are empty most of the time. I am not sure whether you can enlighten us about that in particular, but there are plenty of properties that are not lived in in Scotland. There are loads of them, including long-term voids that the councils have. We need a solution for that.

If the witnesses could first address the land availability issue, contrasting for us the situation in the south and the north of Scotland, that would be very welcome.

I am slightly less concerned about the hoo-ha around the timing of the reports that were published yesterday than I am about the key messages that are contained in them. That is the most important thing to focus on today. The “Intra-UK migration of individuals: movements in numbers and income” report includes some fairly positive messages for the Scottish Government, but the “Impacts of 2018 to 2019 Scottish Income Tax changes on intra-UK migration and labour market participation” report, which Jamie Greene referred to, contains slightly more negative coverage. Can you explain why a report that relates to 2018-19 appeared only yesterday, almost five years after it perhaps could have been produced?

Thank you for that. I hope to come back later on on the S codes issue, but other colleagues are waiting to ask questions.

I do, convener.

It is about the application of the S codes—we ask about that every year. Every year, we see that around 37,000 codes are incorrectly applied, mainly by employers. When will we ever resolve that issue? Is it the same employers, and the same people who are not having their S codes correctly applied? We ask these questions every year, but we never really get close to any solution. What value is placed on the potential loss of tax because of the misapplication of S codes?

I turn to Alyson Stafford. From the Scottish Government’s point of view, you must be encouraged by the most recent findings from 2021-22, but what, collectively, are we doing—Jamie Greene asked about this—to monitor behavioural change in all its facets? In your data collection and data analysis, do you try to find out why people do what they do and why they decide not to make changes? Do we look at the whole blanket of issues to see what affects people’s behaviour?

My next question is perhaps for both Jonathan Athow and Alyson Stafford. The 2021-22 data is much more positive, and the report has established that the previous predictions of gloom and doom about the policy have proven to be untrue. As Robert Burns said, facts are chiels that winna ding—once you get facts, you cannot overturn them. All data is helpful, and we are all able to interpret it in the ways that we choose. We have seen that in the press and the media. Nevertheless, the 2021-22 report provides positive indications for the tax base in Scotland. Could you summarise what you believe the key findings are in relation to the 2021-22 data?