Seòmar agus comataidhean

We do not have a date at the moment.

The local authority is asking for additional capital allocation because of the unique circumstances. There were plans for the refurbishment programme to be managed over a number of years but, because of last year’s significant cut to the capital budget and the delays that that created, we have a really urgent situation with the condition at Milngavie primary, which is having a knock-on effect. The children of four schools in the area are now impacted. Milngavie primary kids will be decanted to other schools while the refurbishment takes place. I think that there is a lot of financial risk and uncertainty underpinning that. There is also a knock-on impact, in that there is a delay to the full rebuilds of Westerton primary and Balmuildy primary, and Bearsden primary will not be refurbished to the extent that was originally envisaged.

Is there any scope for allocation of funding for school buildings outwith the LEIP?

I will stick with colleges and go back to the capital budget—I apologise that I cannot remember who asked questions about it earlier. I understand the Government’s position that, if you take out the Dunfermline learning campus, there is a small real-terms increase. That is not an illegitimate way to present it, but do you acknowledge that the reality is that the maintenance backlog for the college estate far outstrips what can be delivered through the current capital allocation? I completely understand that you cannot allocate money that you do not have, but do you understand why there is so much frustration in the sector about how big the gap is between what is being allocated and the current backlog?

Thanks very much—I appreciate that.

Thanks, convener. I am conscious of time, so I have just one question.

Auditor General, you mentioned in opening that there are lots of examples of public sector reform—we will hear some in a moment. However, ultimately, the issue is the lack of coherence and direction from the Government. Are you aware of any examples of effective reform in the Scottish public sector that either have happened or are on-going as a result of ministerial direction? I do not mean those that are off the back of an initiative by an individual organisation or public body; I mean those that are a direct result of Scottish ministers’ involvement in direction setting.

I have a small, specific point, which does not relate directly to the policy to increase ADS. Would the Government consider a potential ADS exemption in situations where a person in receipt of disability living allowance is able to live independently but is not able to own their own home, and a relative, for example, buys it for them?

I have had a couple of pieces of casework where someone has been liable to pay ADS because they have purchased a property on behalf of a disabled family member who can live independently but is not in a position to own the property.

One of the most interesting recent examples of work on public sector reform has been the Scottish Government’s pilot of the reduced working week, which is sometimes called the four-day working week. South of Scotland Enterprise is one of the bodies that have been involved in that, so I will come to Jane Morrison-Ross first. However, I might be unaware that others around the room have been involved, so anyone can come in on this.

What have your experiences of the pilot been so far? Part of the objective is to support the workforce to have a better work-life balance, but with the aim of increasing the organisation’s productivity. What impact has the pilot had in that regard?

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.

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.