Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good morning, cabinet secretary. I will say something before I get on to my line of questioning.

It is hard to take seriously the Government’s claim that it is trying to get best value for money on spend when independent reviews of existing Government policies are rightly commissioned but then discarded when the conclusions are politically inconvenient. We have discussed the small business bonus scheme before. There are clearly better ways to spend a quarter of a billion pounds to support small businesses. The Government commissioned a review, and the review said that no action has been taken in response.

How do you expect us to take seriously the Government’s claim that it is trying to get best value for money when one of the most notable examples of a policy review—and it was great that the Government was willing to commission that independent review—was simply discarded because it was clearly politically inconvenient?

That would be really useful.

I will bundle up where I have been going with these questions. The Climate Ready Clyde report that I mentioned was produced largely by the university but for the local authorities. Part of what the local authorities were trying to get at was their belief, which I share, that they need more fiscal autonomy to deal with the consequences of climate change. Obviously, extreme weather will do a lot of the damage to infrastructure for which councils are responsible.

We have discussed council tax reform at length previously, so I will not get into that, but I would be interested in the Scottish Government’s position in principle on the extent to which local authorities are able to raise their own revenue. At the moment, council tax is about 20 per cent of local authority budgets; non-domestic rates are nominally a local tax but, in practice, they are not—councils have almost no discretion over them whatsoever. Does the Scottish Government think that the current balance is right, or would you like to see local authorities raise a far greater share of their budgets directly?

The norm across Europe is that municipalities raise a majority of their own budgets; Scotland is an outlier in that regard. Does the Government have a direction of travel with regard to the degree of fiscal autonomy that you want councils to have? Should they be raising the majority of their budgets themselves?

I would strongly support that. If you can provide the committee with further detail on the Government’s engagement with the councils on pension funds being used for capital investment, in particular, I would certainly find that beneficial, and I imagine that other members would, too.

What action was taken in response to it?

That is not what I was planning to ask about, but I wanted to follow up on a previous comment. I will condense this question a bit.

The Fiscal Commission did an excellent piece of work on the cost of climate mitigation and adaptation. The Climate Ready Clyde group, which includes the greater Glasgow local authorities, Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the University of Glasgow, did an excellent report a couple of years ago, which projected that the cost of climate breakdown—not the efforts that we are taking to reduce emissions but the impact that is already locked in—will be something in the region of £400 million a year by 2040 in the greater Glasgow area.

Does the Government have any figures? Have you come to any conclusion on what the cost of adaptation will be? That cost is entirely separate from the record amount of money that is going into mitigation—the £4.9 billion of climate-positive spending is excellent. Does the Government have a ballpark figure that it is planning around in relation to the locked-in damage that will already be done?

Housing and energy being ideal for that, as the returns are very stable.

Thank you.

I have no further supplementary questions. That covers it.

Absolutely. That was really useful.

Perhaps I can press you just a bit further. I have sat on this and similar committees for nine years now and, in that time, really compelling cases have been made to us for all the things that teachers need to be trained in but which they are not being trained in. A couple of times in that period, the committee has done inquiries on initial teacher education, and it has, quite often, come to the same conclusion that, with the best will in the world, and even with a full four-year degree course rather than the one-year postgraduate diploma in education, teachers cannot be trained in absolutely everything.

We are coming to the point that half of all children in Scotland have some kind of additional support need. I am not saying that they are all complex needs—they can vary from their being exceptionally gifted or having English as a second language to the kind of complex needs that your daughter has. Some of the feedback that we get is that, realistically, not every teacher can be trained in everything, and what is really needed is more specialist staff in schools. In your view, what is the balance between trying to train every classroom teacher and every classroom assistant and having more specialist staff on hand in every school?

That is really useful—thank you.