Seòmar agus comataidhean

I want to touch on the points about transparency that the convener made a moment ago. I would like to ask about availability of public data. Everybody here represents a public body. We had evidence from the David Hume Institute which, a couple of years ago, probably presented the most compelling case that there is a net loss to the Scottish economy of roughly £2 billion a year simply because the majority of public data is not directly available to the public.

I do not want to continue picking on Transport Scotland, because I think that the issue relates partly to the Improvement Service as well, but I will give a small example. MSPs regularly lodge parliamentary questions to get updates on the number of young people who have been issued with concessionary bus passes. Usually, breakdowns by local authority are asked for. That seems to me to be a very unproductive system. There are similar areas in which we have to lodge freedom of information requests, for example. That data exists and the counter is constantly ticking up, but it is not on the front page of freebus.scot. That means that we have to go through a costly administrative process in Parliament—I presume that there is also a process in Transport Scotland and the Improvement Service—to get the data and present it. That is one small example.

Another example is that only a handful of public bodies in Scotland operate an open government licence. To be fair, I note that the Scottish Government is one of them, but most executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies do not—they have copyrighted websites.

I put this question to all the witnesses: what are you doing to make your data more directly available to the public? Rather than having it behind a wall and then giving it to somebody when they come and ask for it, for example via FOI, what are you doing to pre-emptively and proactively make that data available in the first place? There is clear evidence that, if we do that, there will be a net benefit to the economy.

I should start with a note of thanks to the minister, recognising that I put the proposal on ADS to the Government on behalf of the Greens in discussions ahead of the budget, so I am glad to see that it is in the first draft.

I will follow on from Craig Hoy’s line of questioning about the Government’s ultimate policy objective, and take up the point that the minister made to Michelle Thomson about us being quite far left of the inflection point on the Laffer curve, as he put it. Is the Government’s objective to maximise the benefit for first-time buyers and maximise behaviour change in the market and, therefore, reduce the amount of revenue that will be received as a consequence, short of the point at which we start to lose revenue as a result, or is there a point of balance before that that the Government is trying to reach? I am trying to understand to what extent the primary objective is to change behaviour as opposed to raising additional revenue.

That is an excellent line to end on.

I apologise for being late to the meeting. I had an urgent task that I thought would be simple but turned out not to be so. I have been watching the live feed and think that I caught most of the meeting before I got here. I certainly caught Mr Briggs grassing up Mr Mason’s transport options.

I will follow on from Miles Briggs’s line of questioning about centre capacity. You will be aware of the Blairvadach centre in my region. The centre, which is run by Glasgow City Council, is an interesting example because it is fully booked all year round at the moment, with a mix of council bookings for its own schools and commercial bookings that subsidise that school work. How would you respond to the suggestion that increasing the obligation to provide space for schools could displace the commercial work and might actually push some centres into a more precarious financial situation? To put it bluntly, they can charge more for commercial bookings than they typically can for school bookings.

I will move on to a totally different area of questioning, but you will be familiar with it because we covered some of the ground at the Finance and Public Administration Committee when it looked at the financial memorandum. The response from trade unions has been interesting, in that there is a significant well of support from teachers for giving more pupils access to residential outdoor education, but there is also an understandable concern from them that that would essentially formalise what at the moment is an informal system that is reliant on voluntary contributions and significant goodwill from teachers. How do you respond in particular to the suggestion that, if outdoor education was put on a statutory footing, the issue would have to go to the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers to be considered as a renegotiation of teachers’ terms and conditions?

As someone who is keen to support the bill, that is probably my chief area of concern, particularly as it relates to the financial memorandum and the wider costs. The system at the moment relies significantly on teachers’ good will and volunteering their time, and it is reasonable to expect teachers to still be broadly willing to do that. However, there is a question of fairness. I struggle to think of many other areas of employment in which we would move something on to a statutory footing—essentially, we are obliging schools to provide it and, de facto, obliging teachers to provide it as part of their employment—but not pay for it.

I absolutely agree with that.

This is my final question on this area. I am interested to hear your thoughts on the suggestion that, if centres had their own centrally employed teachers and appropriately qualified youth workers, perhaps not as many classroom teachers would be required to accompany pupils on trips as has historically been the case. The typical experience is that two primary 7 classes go and both of the primary 7 teachers go too, but there is a suggestion that perhaps only one of them would be required if the centres had an appropriate number of their own appropriately qualified staff.

Thank you very much. That was very useful.

I am grateful for that.

I accept that there will be other significant differences in their legislative provisions and in the wider context, but you said that other jurisdictions that do not have such a timescale with regard to the diagnosis have seen a gradual increase in numbers, too. Are there any particular examples that you would cite in that respect, recognising that there will be other important contextual differences?

I totally understand why, if the bill were to be passed, there would need to be a transition period and a debate about how long that would be. I understand why the CMO, for example, would want it to be longer. However, that line of argument suggests that, at least initially, the system will not be able to meet demand, which would inevitably result in a significant amount of political pressure to increase funding to increase capacity.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of this particular proposal—I am genuinely undecided on the bill at this point—if the Parliament were to pass a law to give people the option of ending their own life, people would have an entirely reasonable expectation that they would be able to choose that option. If they were then to find that they could not choose it simply because the system lacked capacity for them to do so, that would quite understandably result in political pressure to increase funding to increase capacity. That leads me back to the core question on the financial memorandum, which is that costs might increase quicker than is projected, because there will be pressure to meet demand quicker.