Seòmar agus comataidhean

I apologise for missing your opening statement, Deputy First Minister. Each stage of my journey this morning was delayed by the weather.

You made a comment a moment ago about damage to the housing market. Will the Government or Revenue Scotland be in a position in the coming weeks and months to issue revised projections for LBTT receipts, given the impact of the mini-budget on mortgages?

The live data is useful, but I was asking about the assumptions that the Government might make. If we assume, for the purpose of those projections, that there is no change to LBTT policy, projections of long-term income from that tax will be based on assumptions about the effect on the housing market. I am sure that the data for this month and next will look bad. There is a role for Government in trying to make a long-term assumptions, for planning purposes, about how long that effect will last, because that will affect discussions about LBTT policy.

I have a technical question that I perhaps should already know the answer to. How is the interest rate set for the national loans fund? I am conscious that, in recent years, it has been less than 1.5 per cent. However, given the expectation of the resource that the Government is going to be drawing from that fund over the coming years, changes to that interest rate could have relatively significant long-term effects. However, I am not clear how that interest rate is set.

Yes, that will be useful.

I have a wider question. You might be aware of some of the evidence that the committee has taken from various stakeholders in recent weeks. As you would expect, absolutely everybody believes that their sector should be prioritised for additional public spending, yet very few are willing to volunteer where that money might come from. Almost no one is willing to volunteer a cut to funding in another area. Some organisations have come to us with revenue-raising proposals—I can commend Unison’s as some of the most specific proposals that I have seen in quite some time. Other organisations simply say, “Well, you can fund the extra spending that we think we need from tax increases.” They tend to be quite vague; they tend to make statements to say, “Oh well, there are more tax powers to be used than are currently being used.”

In part, I interpret that to be due to a lack of familiarity with the data that is currently available on tax and spend in Scotland. For example, a lot of organisations are not particularly familiar with the fact that the ready reckoners on income tax are published every year. Those organisations would struggle if they were to come up with their own proposals on the reform of, for example, LBTT or council tax.

How do you think we can improve the quality of public debate and public knowledge among key stakeholder groups—not necessarily the public at large—about the tax side of the equation at budget time? If we do not do that, we will continue to be stuck in the loop that we have been in for a long time, in which everyone asks for more money and says that it is simply up to the Parliament and the Government to decide where that money comes from. How do we improve the quality of debate about raising revenue?

What are the Government’s expectations of the effect of fiscal drag this year on income tax receipts?

One reason why we are hosting this session is the correspondence that committee members received from university staff—UCU members—back in the spring about their working conditions. Given that national bargaining takes place UK wide, how can we improve conditions for university staff in Scotland through Scottish Government initiatives or directly at an institutional level?

Is there time for a response on reserves from Ellie Gomersall?

I have one final question for Professor Boyne. You will have heard in the previous evidence session discussion around my questions to the panel about working conditions in universities, so it is only fair that you have the opportunity to lay out Universities Scotland’s position on that issue. Why is there a relatively high prevalence of casualisation, zero-hours contracts, short-term contracts and so on in the sector?

I have a final question for both of you. Do you think that we have the right funding model? Essentially, we fund all universities on the same basis—on a per student basis. The University of Glasgow has around £1 billion in its reserves while the University of Edinburgh has around £1.8 billion in its unrestricted reserves and about £2.8 billion in total. A number of other universities, such as Glasgow Caledonian University, Abertay University and Edinburgh Napier University, do not have those amounts. Given the monumental pressure on Scottish Government finances at the moment, is it right that all universities are funded on the same basis, or should we expect institutions that have larger reserves than the Scottish Government has to take a bit of money out of their own pockets to help through what will be a very difficult couple of years?

You mentioned that flat cash is unsustainable. The Scottish Government’s settlement for the next couple of years is also a flat cash one. Therefore, it is a question of priorities for the Government.