Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good morning. I want to touch on two topics: local government and climate.

Your report picks out the expectation that local government is in line for a pretty raw deal over the coming years compared with other areas of Scottish Government spending. That is in a context where we already hear about severe pressures and about some councils facing a genuine risk that they will fail to meet statutory obligations. Quite a few of the witnesses who have spoken to this committee when we have been looking at our legacy issues have highlighted that in terms of the “broken” nature of the council tax—that is the phrasing that comes up most frequently; in other words, the idea that we do not have a functional modern tax system for local government. We have spoken in the past about the fact that you do not make the projections for council tax because it is a local tax, but that seems to me to echo the fact that the Scottish Government has a bit of a hands-off approach. It will set the financial context for local government, and then it is for local government to worry about the consequences. Will you comment on where we stand at the moment and on the likely impact of the spending reductions that you have highlighted on those services?

Will you also comment on how we grasp the challenge of developing a coherent approach to taxation generally? Assuming that there continues to be a majority in the next Parliament for progressive tax as a principle, an element of redistribution to fund universal services and so on, how can council tax, or local government taxation more generally, play its part in a coherent tax policy for Scotland when the current system is so wildly outdated?

:In a way, the point relates to the question that Michelle Thomson asked about whether a range of factors suggest that the old normal is gone and that we will not return to the period that you described—when you were at university—when there were assumptions that everybody worked with. The phrase “limits to growth”—the idea that breaching environmental thresholds will make growth unsustainable—is now older than I am. Do we need to confront the fact that the ecosystem thresholds have already been breached to such an extent that growth is unsustainable?

:We will not get into a philosophical debate now about the definition of or what counts as infrastructure, but I suggest that, around the world, we are continuing to effectively wipe out the pollinators that we depend on for our food system. If a tech bro came along saying, “I can do that artificially,” they would quickly get Governments to accept that the machinery that they were developing should be classed as infrastructure, and it would be an infrastructure priority, even though it was only needed because we had wiped out something that was doing the same thing much more effectively in the first place.

I suggest that the problem is not just what is in the infrastructure delivery pipeline but the model of a pipeline. The metaphor of a pipeline is the wrong way to think about this. It makes absolute sense from the perspective of someone who makes their living from building stuff, which is important, but we should be considering it from the other end of the telescope and the perspective of the set of assets that our society needs. We have a hierarchy of needs. Most fundamentally, we need clean air to breathe, clean water and shelter. Moving on, we want to have a functional society with sewerage systems, healthcare systems, an element of transport infrastructure and a modern economy. At the least fundamental but more aspirational end, we might want to replace fast internet with superfast internet, but that is a “nice to have” rather than a fundamental need.

Ultimately, we need to ensure that we never degrade something that meets fundamental needs in order to achieve something at the lower end of that hierarchy. Should we not conceive of it in those terms rather than just focusing on a pipeline of what we are going to build?

:Does that happen before a project moves from annex B into annex A in the pipeline document?

:Okay—thank you.

:Yes, it is very tiresome.

:Are you saying that you specifically need the Scottish Government to commission its own work in that area, or could, for example, the national security assessment from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs be drawn on to help you to understand the consequences for Scotland?

:I would like to ask the witnesses to reflect on a slightly different perspective. I think that you were here during the earlier part of the meeting and may have heard my questions to the Scottish Fiscal Commission about the economic and security risks that come from ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss. The kind of infrastructure that people have been building for many generations—what we have been building, how we have been building it and how we have been using it—is one of the fundamental reasons why we are living in an era of ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss.

The Government produced a consultation on its infrastructure strategy at the same time as it published the pipeline document. The consultation says:

“Infrastructure is the set of long-term assets that enable countries, cities, and communities to function effectively. Infrastructure is all around us and can be private or public; economic, social or natural.”

I would suggest that the role of natural infrastructure has been slightly lost. I do not want to take away from the importance and value of the stuff that we build, but that can come at a cost to the natural infrastructure that we also depend on. If I look at the projects in the pipeline, the only elements that appear to have any relationship at all to natural infrastructure are also things that we are doing, such as peatland restoration, creating woodlands and what have you. There is no space for, or reflection on, the infrastructure that nature provides for us and is already here, and that we too often destroy or degrade. We too often undermine nature’s ability to regenerate itself because of the way that we build infrastructure.

Why is the dynamic relationship between natural and artificial infrastructure not in some way reflected in the document that you have produced?

:Would that work involve looking at the implications for local government services or for the rest of the public sector, too? For example, when local government cannot do X work to the standard that it would wish, that will have a knock-on impact on the health service; when the Scottish Government is trying to put an extra £100 million a year into culture, the danger is that that simply results in councils cutting their culture spending much more than they already were, because they know that the extra money is coming in from national Government?

:You have spoken about climate already a couple of times during the meeting, mostly in relation to the drive to net zero, how to achieve that, whether the fact that Scotland is behind schedule on that will put UK targets at risk, and the cost of catching up the lost ground and making progress towards the targets. However, the flipside is the cost of inaction. I do not know whether the commission has had a chance to look at the national security assessment of biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. If my memory serves me well, it was due to be published in August; a shortened, edited version of it was published by the UK Government in January; and, in the past week or so, the media got hold of and published the full version, which showed that environmental damage could cost up to 12 per cent of GDP by 2030. That will be within the term of the Parliament that we are about to elect, and that is a much more significant economic cost than was previously estimated. Has the commission looked at that? You are not an environmental adviser or regulator, but have you looked at the fiscal implications of the failure that we are already in, in relation to ecosystem collapse?