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I am sure that the committee will raise the subject in other places; I will certainly raise it in other places.

Economic growth is linked to that. I was interested in paragraph 64 of the report, which talks about timescales. It says that, if the Scottish Government does something now,

“such as supporting people into employment or investing in skills”,

that can

“take time, often many years, to feed through to the tax base and increasing tax receipts.”

It is quite difficult to make comparisons, is it not? You mentioned national outcomes and so on. An input today might take five or 10 years or more before we see its impact. Is it not hard to tie the two together? Suddenly, Ukraine has a war, for example, and that throws everything else that is going on.

How many people are even interested in that? A lot of my constituents just say, “We want lower taxes and we want more money spent on public services.” That is the level of a lot of the public conversation. The tax difference is just way out of range for a lot of people.

As an accountant, I take your point that accountants have not been trying to make things easier for the public to understand—they have been trying to follow lots of rules and all the rest of it, so I think that that is right. Do you have any suggestions about what could be done? We have discussed this with the Fiscal Commission as well, and it takes exactly the view that you do—I think that we are all in the same place. Should we try to do more in schools with regard to financial education at an early age? Of course, that is a challenge, too.

I do not know whether I am being overly pessimistic but, with this whole thing where we are tied to comparing our growth with that of the UK, I think that you are saying that we do not entirely understand that link and that we might need to do more on that, which I would accept to an extent. In 1603, James VI left Scotland because London was richer and was going to grow faster than Edinburgh and all the rest of it. We have had quite a long time to look at that, and the position has not really changed.

I do not know whether you are prepared to comment on the fiscal framework, which I feel is fixed so that Scotland loses. Your report mentions the Barnett formula, which is intended to squeeze Scottish spending. It seems inevitable that the fiscal framework is also squeezing Scottish spending. Do you think that that is inevitable? Can the Scottish Government do something about that?

My final point is on paragraph 82, which talks about having more of a strategy for reconciliations. Will you expand on that a wee bit? In the past, we have sometimes been warned about a huge negative reconciliation but, when we have got to the time, it has not been as bad as that. It is quite difficult to predict positive or negative reconciliations. Is it possible to have a strategy?

I want to follow up on some of the things the convener has been asking about. The word “transparency” has come up quite a lot. I wonder whether you are being a bit unfair on the Government, because the Government can produce any amount of information and you or somebody else can audit it, so it is all checked. However, if the public and, frankly, MSPs do not engage in trying to find out about it, that is not really the Government’s fault, is it? It has been said that MSPs on the whole are not fiscally or financially literate—we are hoping to build that into future Parliaments. Do you not think that it is partly the public and everybody else who is at fault?

I accept that point, yes.

I understand all of that, but let us take the £851 million that is mentioned for 2027-28. One strategy would be to say, “Right—let’s severely cut spending this year and next year to build up a reserve so that we’re ready for that £851 million.” However, in the meantime, the criticism of the Government for not spending its money would be horrendous—because there would be all the national health service waiting lists and all the rest of it—and then maybe the negative reconciliation of £851 million would not happen. The Government is in a no-win position, is it not?

I tend to share the convener’s view that more people perhaps do not realise that they do not understand the tax system, and that the Scottish people are probably being a bit more honest about their lack of understanding than the people who were surveyed in England. That is just my opinion.

Paragraph 32 says that

“the growth in the tax base in Scotland has been relatively slower than in the rest of the UK”

and lists four factors that explain that. I accept that the Scottish Government is largely in control of behavioural responses from taxpayers to policy changes, because it controls its policy changes. However, we cannot really do anything about the other factors, which include

“differences in the sectoral make-up of the economy”

and

“Different distribution of incomes in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK”.

Similarly, the report goes on to talk about how financial services in the rest of the UK are different from those in Scotland, and the fact that there are many more high earners in that industry outside of Scotland. As I said, a lot of that is outwith our control, is it not?