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Thank you very much for that injection of enthusiasm.

Can I ask a brief supplementary based on the last set of questions, which have been largely about matters of competitiveness and price sensitivity? To some extent, this is a policy that has been based on the assumption that a price can be added on and that customers will pay it. To what extent are tourism businesses price setters and to what extent are they price takers of a price that is set by the market? This is, in the formal parlance, about the elasticity of demand. To some extent, it will be neither one thing nor the other; it will be somewhere in between. To what extent can tourism businesses set a price and to what extent do they have to accept the price that the market sets and tourists are willing to pay? Marc Crothall, you are the one who has been discussing this.

I feel compelled at this point to say that we appreciate both Oasis and Oasis fans in this committee.

When policies are introduced, it is always worth taking a deep breath and taking a couple of steps back and asking whether we are where we expected to be. When the visitor levy was first mooted, people were talking about a pound or two on a hotel visit. If we are looking at 7 per cent and then we add VAT, it is in effect 10 per cent on top. If we managed to find a hotel room for £150 in Edinburgh, it is putting another £15 on top of that bill. Is that 10 per cent additional charge to the guest what was expected when this was first discussed?

In that case, I call Kevin Stewart.

I welcome our second panel of the morning. With us from the City of Edinburgh Council, we have Paul Lawrence, chief executive, and Elin Williamson, head of business and growth. We also have Malcolm Macleod, assistant chief executive, place, Highland Council; Rob Dickson, director of industry and events, VisitScotland; and Cat Leaver, director of strategy and competitive intelligence, VisitScotland.

I will open with a slightly different version of the opening question that I put to our first panel. Do you feel that we are ready to implement a visitor levy, and what impact do you think that the visitor levy will have, given the economic context of the tourism industry that we heard outlined by the industry representatives earlier? I invite Paul Lawrence to respond first, not least because he might want to respond to some of the points that were raised by the previous panel of witnesses.

I would like to advise the witness, who managed to name check various parts of the city and not mention any parts of south Edinburgh, that Bruntsfield and Morningside could use investment as well.

I will move on to the other witnesses. Two specific points were raised earlier, and the one that I am most concerned about is the level of business awareness and engagement, given that the levy is soon to be introduced. Could you address that point?

The second point concerns the 18-month lead-in period. January is not 18 months ago, and the situation is made more concerning by the fact that the SSI that we mentioned might introduce a further change. Could you address the point around the lead time that businesses have asked for, as was expressed quite clearly by the previous witnesses?

If Elin Williamson and Cat Leaver would like to come in, please say. Otherwise, I will go to the principal witnesses from each of the organisations.

Rob Dickson, I put the same opening question to you. Do you think that we are ready for the visitor levy, and what do you think the impact will be, given the economic context of the tourism industry in Scotland?

That is slightly different from saying that there are lots of different ways of looking at it.

Again, I will push back on that. As somebody who stopped doing economics in my first year of university, I may be going beyond the bounds of my expertise, but I think that what you are saying is slightly different. It is not that there is not elasticity of demand; it is that you have rising levels of demand but, at any given moment, the market will be finding a price. If you were to put prices up by 5 per cent at that moment, you would expect to see some reduction. It could be a 5 per cent drop in demand or a 1 per cent drop in demand, but you would expect to see a drop in demand.

I accept that it may be a difficult assessment to make but I think that it is questionable to say that there would be no impact on demand. I am just wondering about that assessment of what a 5 per cent increase would do to demand—which is different from saying that there are rising levels of demand.

I want to ask a couple of final questions about the technicalities of the collection of the visitor levy. Let us look at the Edinburgh proposition. There will be a 5 per cent levy, and the council will allow accommodation providers to retain 2 per cent of that, but there will be 20 per cent VAT on top of that. Would it not be better just to charge 3 per cent? The key concern of providers is that they will have to put their prices up in a way that is beyond their control. The council would get the same amount of money if it just charged a 3 per cent levy and the accommodation providers would be able to charge a lower price. Would that not be simpler?

Sorry—you need to say that again.