Seòmar agus comataidhean

I highlight that my amendments do not specify exactly how the revaluation exercise should take place, with two exceptions. First, my amendments would set a deadline of 1 April 2029 and, secondly, they would place a duty on ministers to consider appropriate transitional reliefs. I agree that there is a wider debate, but everyone who is involved in the debate agrees that we cannot use 1991 valuations as the basis of any substantive reform to, or replacement of, council tax. No reform process can move forward without revaluation taking place first. Why has the Scottish Government never put a revaluation proposal to the Parliament, never mind simply moved ahead with a revaluation exercise?

I think that what members are looking for from the Government is an indication of whether it agrees with the principle behind the amendments. If it agrees on the principle—and it has recognised the consensus on this matter across the Parliament—and if it is simply a question of working with the PBSA review group on drafting that can be agreed at stage 3, that is one thing.

If the Government disagrees with the principle behind the amendments, which is that student tenants should have the same right to end their tenancy as private students, as well as the principle of a set of model terms and conditions, as the PBSA review group has recommended—I believe that the Government has accepted that recommendation—there is no incentive for members to hold back at this stage and come back at stage 3. We are all looking for an indication from the Government on the point of principle behind each of the amendments. If that indication is there, there is scope to work with the Government before stage 3, but if there is not, my intention would be to move my amendments at this stage and see what the committee’s view is.

I am grateful for the intervention. There is a much wider point. The small business bonus scheme was reviewed independently for the Scottish Government by the Fraser of Allander Institute, which could find no measurable positive economic impact from it. I think that the small business bonus scheme needs to be redesigned, because I agree that small businesses should be supported, and the tax system is a way to do that through exemptions, reductions, and so on. As it stands, we spend about a quarter of a billion pounds on the SBBS every year, and in many cases, it is received by businesses that many of us would not recognise as small. It is not a particularly well-designed scheme.

Rachael Hamilton’s point also relates to my amendment 461. At present, a short-term let property would pay 200 per cent council tax if it is available to let for fewer than 140 days a year, or if it is actually let for fewer than 70. When it passes that threshold, it moves from paying double the rate of one tax to paying non-domestic rates. At that point, it potentially qualifies for, most commonly, the small business bonus scheme, meaning that it can end up paying no rates at all.

At the moment, we have a system that has two contradictory aims and a relatively arbitrary threshold between the two of them. We are not getting the balance right, in certain areas in particular. As much as I take on board the point about the importance of short-term lets to the tourist economy, the most common bit of feedback that I hear from employers and businesses in those areas is about their inability to recruit staff to run their business because there is no permanent housing available for them. Lochranza on Arran is the perfect example—40 per cent of housing there is either a holiday home or a short-term let, which makes it incredibly challenging for local employers to find staff to work in bars, restaurants, cafes and leisure facilities.

I will move on as I am recognise how much time I am taking with this group. The infrastructure levy is covered by amendment 550. Amendment 550 would repeal the sunset cause that is currently in place for the levy under the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019, although the repeal would extend only to housing developments, due to the scope of the bill. Parliament’s ability to replace or complement the existing framework of planning obligations is set to expire by the summer of 2026. We should all probably reflect on why we put a sunset cause into the 2019 act, because the rationale for it was not particularly clear and it means that the infrastructure levy power expires in the summer of 2026 unless regulations are made. At that point, we will have lost the ability to bring in an infrastructure levy in the future if we believe that it is appropriate, unless that power is recreated through primary legislation. Given that it is already in legislation, I suggest that that approach is inappropriate.

I accept that the Government has decided not to proceed with the infrastructure levy at this point, but unless regulations are made, or amendment 550 is agreed to, to nullify the sunset cause, the power disappears completely. In 2019, we took the view collectively that such a power was required, so I think that it would be wasteful to let it expire. If we decided in a few years that an infrastructure levy was justified, we would need to recreate it through primary legislation.

The current system of developer contributions under section 75 of the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 is applied exceptionally unevenly, and it clearly disadvantages smaller and rural and island authorities, which lack the in-house expertise and the legal capacity to secure those agreements. For example, 10 councils had no section 75 agreements last year. Such agreements provide for the voluntary contributions that developers make to local authorities. Sixteen councils had fewer than 10 such agreements each, and the relative value of them varied massively. Only half a dozen councils had more than 10 agreements. I am happy to share more information on that with colleagues if they would find it beneficial.

The rationale behind the infrastructure levy is that building houses does not mean building communities; all sorts of other infrastructure is required to turn a housing estate into a successful functioning community. You need funding for the provision of schools, health centres and public transport infrastructure, including roads, pavements and active travel. It is right that developers contribute towards that because they are the ones building the houses but not building the community as a whole. We can have that debate again—I suggest that it is a debate for the next parliamentary session, because I accept that the Government has decided that it will not introduce an infrastructure levy for now.

It would be a real shame if we allowed the sunset clause to take away our ability to have this debate again in the future without having to go through the cumbersome process of recreating something that we have already created in primary legislation because we have allowed it to lapse.

You will be pleased to hear, convener, that that is the end of my contribution.

I move amendment 519.

The minister has talked a number of times this morning about amendments being lodged relatively late in the process. I want to clarify the timeline. The PBSA review group reported in February 2024 and the bill was published in March 2024, so I accept that the group’s recommendations could not have been written into the bill, which had already been signed off at the point that the review group published. However, there have been 15 months since then. I cannot speak for other members, but my intentions to lodge amendments on this area were sent to the Government in January of this year.

Can the minister confirm whether discussions have already taken place with the PBSA review group on recommendations that it made that would require statutory change and, therefore, what amendments to the bill would be required? If those discussions have taken place with the review group about what could be changed via the bill, could the minister clarify which specific elements of the recommendations were discussed?

The minister is making two lines of argument against my amendment. One, which we have heard already this morning, is about the need for further consultation with the PBSA review group; the second is an argument in practice against the principle of students being able to end their tenancies early like any other private tenant.

To clarify, is the Scottish Government’s position that, because of the different business model, students in PBSA should not have the same right as other private tenants to end their tenancy early? As I said, if the argument is one about the need for further consultation with the review group so that amendments that will have the same effect can be lodged at stage 3, that is one thing. However, it sounds as if the Government disagrees with the principle that PBSA tenants should have that same right to end the tenancy early. I would be grateful if the minister could clarify that point.

Amendment 61 is relatively simple. The intention is to make sure that there is no gatekeeping of key information by qualifications Scotland staff and that, if the strategic advisory council makes a reasonable request for information to discharge its duties, that information is provided. Again, the amendment is a reflection of the issues of trust, transparency, accountability and so on that have got us here.

The debate on amendment 62 is equivalent to the debate on the presence of staff that we have already had in relation to the learner interest committee and the teacher and practitioner interest committee. There is no reason for members of qualifications Scotland staff to be on the strategic advisory council. The purpose of the council is to provide advice based on expertise, lived experience and so on. Given the debates that we have already had and the decisions that we have made in relation to those committees, it would be appropriate to take the same approach to the strategic advisory council.

Amendment 66 would clarify that qualifications Scotland staff can still attend meetings of the strategic advisory council. I of course want them to be there and to hear the discussions, but I want to make sure that the power dynamic in the room is appropriately balanced, and the best way to do that is for staff to not be members of the council.

My amendment 9, the cabinet secretary’s amendments 63, 64 and 65 and Pam Duncan-Glancy’s amendment 252 are all broadly in the same space of consultation. We have just had a similar debate on the wider duties on qualifications Scotland to consult. My amendment 9 is almost identical to the amendment that I moved in a previous group on qualifications Scotland. Given that the cabinet secretary has agreed to my key point about the need for consultation with the wider group of learners beyond the interest committees, and with those who undertake qualifications and those who deliver them, and on the basis of that previous discussion, I will be happy not to move amendment 9 if the cabinet secretary agrees to take the same approach with amendments 63, 64 and 65.

I suggest to Pam Duncan-Glancy that we take the same approach to amendment 252, so that we can resolve the issue around consultation requirements, responsibilities and encouragement—the nudge that I mentioned previously—in a coherent and consistent manner.

I am grateful to the member for his intervention, and for not making the intervention that was requested by Mr Kerr, because I am about to conclude.

The principle of democratic accountability and the Crown are two somewhat alien and mutually exclusive concepts. In practical terms, however, the point that I am making is not about the institution of the monarchy, but about the head of state. Even a president should not be able to flick through the CVs of potential candidates for chief inspector. Indeed, given that we have—nominally, although I would disagree—a politically neutral and independent head of state in the King, it would be deeply inappropriate if they ever intervened in the process and rejected a nominee that was put forward to them by the Scottish ministers. That would go against the constitutional settlement that we have in the modern United Kingdom, and it would certainly go against the settlement that the monarchy purports to support in respect of neutrality in that regard.

As I said, this set of amendments is really about the principle of efficiency. I do not think that the appointments and oversight process should be done via the Crown, which is symbolically independent but not independent in practice. For it to be genuinely independent, the process would include the possibility of the Crown rejecting proposed appointments that were made by the Scottish ministers, which would violate a pretty core element of our existing constitutional set-up.

My position on many of these amendments, especially the large group of amendments in the name of Sue Webber, reflects our discussion on the convener’s amendments on a new independent regulator. The Finance and Public Administration Committee—of which, along with John Mason, I am a member—considered issues related to the creation of new public bodies and, in particular, SPCB-appointed bodies. In our report to Parliament, we made a strong recommendation and did something that it is unusual to do in the context of a committee report—we put forward a motion to Parliament in which, rather than asking Parliament as a whole to note our report, we asked it specifically to agree to a moratorium on the creation of new SPCB-appointed office-bearers.

I also have some specific issues in relation to moving the inspectorate entirely within the purview of Parliament. Ultimately, ministers have responsibility for the setting of education policy in Scotland, which is a significant responsibility. If we were to have a wider debate about whether we should remove education policy entirely from the remit of ministers, I would have a lot of questions about that.

The example that I have used before—I think that I might have used it in the stage 1 debate—is that it is entirely legitimate for the Scottish ministers to decide on a specific element of education policy, to instruct and expect schools to implement it and, then, after a few years, to ask the chief inspector to conduct a thematic inspection on that. Five or six years ago, the Government made a decision on LGBTQ-inclusive education. It would be entirely legitimate for the Government to say that it wanted to carry out a thematic inspection to ensure that that has been implemented.

Recently, we have had many parliamentary debates about pupil behaviour and violence against women and girls in particular. It is right for the Parliament to hold ministers to account on such important issues, and it is appropriate for ministers to retain the power to instruct a thematic inspection on, for example, how schools deal with violence against women and girls. That is an issue that I think requires such examination, because there are significant inconsistencies in policy.

I want to strengthen Parliament’s role in relation to, and its relationship, with the inspectorate. My amendment 92, which we will come to later, seeks to do that in relation to inspection plans, although I am open to other ways in which we can do that. The best way to describe it is that I want the inspectorate to have greater independence in most areas of practice, but not in relation to its form and not in every area of practice. For example, Pam Duncan-Glancy highlighted the issue of the terms and conditions of inspectorate staff, and I would probably share her position in relation to home schooling.

Turning briefly to Willie Rennie’s amendments, I am minded to support amendment 147 in particular, although I have some questions about the practice of inspectors being appointed “on the recommendation of” the chief inspector when, in practice, they will be appointed by the chief inspector. However, the principle behind that amendment is sound. The same is true of amendment 160. I think that it is desirable to provide for some extra scrutiny of the regulations on the intervals for schools to be inspected.

I have significant concerns about amendment 156, because I can envisage situations in which ministers would want to instruct the inspectorate to inspect a school—for example, for specific reasons that relate to welfare concerns that have been raised—and the delay that would result from having to seek the approval or the input of a parliamentary committee would not be acceptable. There are non-urgent situations for which I would welcome some kind of mechanism whereby ministers would seek the input of Parliament, but I do not want anything that could delay ministers’ instruction of inspections—particularly if there is a welfare issue. I am aware that that has been the case in the past.

I welcome amendments 342 and 345 from Pam Duncan-Glancy. However, on amendment 340, my concern—on which I would welcome clarification from the cabinet secretary—is that, at the moment, in practice, ministers request a copy of every inspection report, and there are a number of those every week, and the process of laying all those before the Parliament would be not just an unnecessary burden on the inspectorate but an additional burden on the Parliament. The business bulletin would certainly get a lot larger each week. For that reason, I cannot support amendment 340. However, the proposals in amendments 342 and 345 are advisable.

I will start off by talking to amendment 58, by way of explanation, as that will make for the most coherent sequencing.

Amendment 58 is, I hope, quite simple. It reflects the feedback that I have had, and that I know that other members have had, around the significant disillusionment among those who have, in good faith, given their time in order to give advice to the SQA in recent years, and who have either felt that that advice has not been taken on board, or simply never heard back and do not know what happened as a result.

It would be inappropriate to mandate that qualifications Scotland has to take on board whatever advice it has received. Advice can be contradictory, not all advice is correct, and two perfectly reasonable pieces of advice can be mutually exclusive. That is therefore not what I am seeking to do. I am simply seeking to provide a feedback loop to the strategic advisory council in particular. If we are expecting people to contribute to the success of the organisation through the strategic advisory council and, as specified in the legislation, to provide advice to the organisation, it is only reasonable to require the organisation to then feed back to the advisory council on how it has decided to act in response to that advice. That is therefore what amendment 58 seeks to do.

Amendments 57, 7 and 8 are on consultation requirements. They are really just about expanding the groups that we think that qualifications Scotland should consult as it goes about discharging its duties. Consulting those groups is not a requirement; the amendments relate to a section that specifies that qualifications Scotland should consult where it believes that it is “appropriate to do so”—so not in all circumstances. That goes back to what I described last week in relation to the nudge that we are trying to give the organisation. It is not necessary for qualifications Scotland to consult widely in every instance on every decision that it makes, but I want it to actively consider whether it should do so. In the past five years, certainly—indeed, I would argue in the past 10 to 20 years—there have been a range of occasions when the SQA would have benefited from consulting widely, particularly with students, learners, teachers and lecturers, on relatively simple decisions, where the consultation requirements would not have been onerous—situations when yes/no survey-type responses would have resulted in very valuable data.

Amendment 8 specifies who we are talking about in that regard. As a matter of course, qualifications Scotland should consult the learner interest committee and the teacher and practitioner interest committee, but I have also specified that it should consult those undertaking qualifications and those who are delivering the qualifications—in other words, students, teachers and lecturers—and I have included a catch-all reference to any others that qualifications Scotland believes to be appropriate.

Again, this is about trying to provide a clear direction of travel and an indication of what we expect from the organisation, without being too prescriptive about all the circumstances under which it must consult. The point is that consulting only the committees is not necessarily enough and that the organisation should consider whether, in certain circumstances, it is appropriate to consult more widely. Certainly, an element of the feedback that we have received up until now is that, even where good-quality consultation has taken place—for example, with the learner panel of the SQA—the vast majority of learners in Scotland have not known anything about it, and there should be wider consultation. Even if the response is not necessarily taken on board, the act of consultation, in and of itself, generates buy-in to the decisions that are eventually made and generates good faith in the organisation.

Amendment 60 is an unusual one. I acknowledge from the start that I am not aware of other circumstances in which we are so specific in legislation that a public body must give due regard to the views expressed by the Parliament. However, again, that reflects our experience with the SQA, which has brought us to this point. It would not be appropriate to specify that all recommendations made by the Parliament be taken on board. We can all acknowledge that, as much as our committee inquiry reports are generally of a very high quality, it is not necessarily the case that we get everything right all the time, and we cannot mandate that those be followed.

I cannot guarantee that. The issue is partly about the board appointment process and making sure that the right individuals are appointed to the board. That is particularly important when it comes to the chair. In recent months, we have seen the difference that having a highly proactive board chair has made.

Nothing that we can do in legislation will guarantee that every individual on the board of qualifications Scotland will be as effective and as actively involved as we want them to be, but we can build in mechanisms that make that a little bit more likely. In this case, given the corporate plan’s importance to the organisation, ensuring that that document was actively considered and voted on would, I hope, improve the situation. There are no guarantees here, because, ultimately, we are talking about individual personalities and performance, which we cannot legislate for.

On amendment 35, we have touched on a couple of points in the past, particularly in relation to proposed new paragraph (c) of section 14(3), which relates to employers. What I am proposing in amendment 35 is that qualifications Scotland consults on the corporate plan before it is finalised. It should consult a range of key groups. As you would expect, that should include those undertaking the qualifications, namely the learners, and those delivering them, namely the teachers, college lecturing staff and so on. However, I also think that that is the appropriate point to engage with business and to bring in employers. We have talked about that in various other settings—for example, whether there is space on other committees for individuals representing industry and so on. It is important that employers who will be using the qualifications that learners will, we hope, obtain are consulted on the corporate plan. Amendment 35 would expand the list of stakeholders and service users who must be consulted in preparing the corporate plan, but it is not an exhaustive list. Proposed new paragraph (d) of section 14(3) states that qualifications Scotland can consult others, as required.

Some members who were involved in the stage 2 proceedings of the Scottish Languages Bill might recognise amendment 71, which is a proposal that the Law Society of Scotland has made on a number of occasions in relation to public bodies to improve transparency. It should be an incredibly unlikely event that Scottish ministers reject the corporate plan of any public body, but, in the event that they did, something would quite obviously have gone wrong. I would argue, as the Law Society has done a number of times in the past, that it would be in the public interest to publish the reasons for rejecting the plan. That is particularly to aid parliamentary scrutiny, which is relevant for this body, given the discussions that we have had about the difficulties of effective scrutiny and accountability in relation to the SQA.