Seòmar agus comataidhean

The principle has always been that we do not want to get into an environment where we would be concerned about waste tourism—if you want to call it that. The whole intention is to drive behavioural change through the tax and other policy measures. The trends are clearly moving in a downward direction for both inert and non-inert waste. That is the primary policy intention.

However, there is scope for us to look at what differential rates could do. We need to assess how much additional income that would raise. In the context of the revenue that is being raised reducing significantly anyway as a consequence of the behavioural change that the tax is driving, I am not sure that any increase would make a significant difference.

A number of things are happening there. The invest to save fund is one lever, the orders are another and we have other levers on-going. We have talked about the estates programme, the procurement frameworks, digitisation and the automation programme that has already saved a significant amount of money, and those programmes continue. The invest to save fund is targeted specifically at the harder-to-crack challenges, such as the cross-portfolio co-operation that is required, and there are improvements that might take a period of time to generate savings.

To directly answer your question on the invest to save fund, that process has opened. We have already received the first trawl back of those submissions. Officials are looking at those now, and I will see them in the next week or two. Then, before the end of this month, we will identify the projects that we are taking forward with regard to investment of that £30 million.

Those projects will identify how much investment they want, what savings they will deliver as a consequence and in what timescale. As we select those projects and aggregate them, we will be able to answer the question directly and monitor how they are delivered.

To flip that, one of the big criticisms that we rightly get from the third sector and many other organisations is that we do not have multiyear funding, and that affects zero-based budgeting. We go back every year with a blank piece of paper and decide who is going to get the money. Rolling that uncertainty out more widely across the public sector could cause more challenges than it solves problems, so we need to be careful about what we mean by zero-based budgeting.

That said, this is about taking a step back to consider the purpose and deliverables of a group of public bodies in a particular part of the landscape and whether the current configuration is the most effective one or whether we should do things differently. At that point, you would start with a blank piece of paper when considering the minimum number of bodies that would be needed to deliver what you wanted and whether it would be cost effective to make a transformation.

It would be a multiyear approach, because, by its nature, it would take a longer period. You would not do that wholesale; you would look for the low-hanging fruit. To be honest, we have done that in relation to the police and colleges, and we have cited other, minor examples in which the functions of bodies have been brought together. We will continue to look for ways to do that.

I will try to get my head around that.

That is a good question. Because it is a complex system, it is not simply a case of one policy intervention making one difference that you can then measure.

We talked earlier about the landfill tax, and there you have a much cleaner line of sight when we make an intervention: we can see the behavioural change, the tax numbers and how that flows through. On the more general policy ambition, it is the nature of public service reform to have to deal with many interlocking bodies, policies and objectives at different levels.

There is a measure in the amount of money that we can demonstrably save by driving more efficiency across the system. That is one hard measure, and we are focused on measuring savings. There are also measures around what you might call the top line or the ultimate priorities of the Government’s agenda, of reducing poverty, growing the economy and tackling the climate crisis. We have top-line measures, but, as I said, there are clearly many different policy objectives that drive into and can influence those.

I suppose that it is a question of looking for more intermediate measures, many of which are covered in the national performance framework. Again, when it comes to a clear line of sight, many policies and bodies will be impacting that. In some places, it is clearer—for example, in the health service, there is throughput and the number of operations or procedures that are carried out and so on. In other areas, there is a lengthier process before we get feedback on policy interventions. In other areas, it might be easier to measure productivity—within Social Security Scotland, for example.

There is a range of different measures, and we are very open to quantifying some of those if it helps the committee and us to understand them.

If we take those harder efficiency measures, we published data on what public bodies spend and the back-office cuts last year, and we will update it this year. That gives us numbers on the total spend on estates in the public sector, on maintenance of those estates, on procurement, on corporate finance, human resources functions, and so on. That data is now available for the first time across the public body landscape.

In parallel with that, we regularly publish data on how much money we are saving in the estates, and that number is £36 million up to now.

We are working on that now. We are going back out to public bodies at the moment to get data for their 2025-26 budgets. We are working with public sector leaders to understand the best time to do that, but it will be in the next few weeks. We will go out for the next trawl of data, and it will be published towards the middle of this year.

We would welcome that.

We will look at how the Welsh policy operates. If there were potential for waste tourism, that would be geographically easier to do from Wales into England than from Scotland into England. We will see how that works, take a sense of it and consider it in our deliberations on the tax for the next year.