Seòmar agus comataidhean

Dr Hardt also said that council tax reform

“is long overdue, because the current system is regressive. We know that the Scottish Government has powers over income tax bands, but it has not made a lot of use of them.”

I am not quite sure what he meant by that, but perhaps you might. Dr Hardt went on to say that

“Even if there might be good reasons for such an approach not being considered in more detail,”

he was surprised that more information on raising finances was not there, given that

“It is a five-year spending review”.—[Official Report, COVID-19 Recovery Committee, 22 September 2022; c 25.]

Is that a criticism that you accept?

What kind of body would the centre for pandemic preparedness be? Would it be, say, a statutory body or a non-departmental public body? How do you envisage it?

I am fine. I do not have a question.

I want to go back to Diarmaid Lawlor on his point about getting projects ready. The previous panel mentioned the problem of getting contractors on an island who can do the work. If contractors are not available on an island, the project cannot move forward and therefore does not get funding. Therefore, contractors will not go to an island because the funding is not there for them to do the work. I fully support the idea of a competitive tendering process, but is there not a danger of creating a catch-22 situation by doing it in that way?

I ask this question merely out of curiosity. If we had an allocation system instead of a competitive system, would that not just mean that the money would be spread across everything? People would say, “I could do a bit of this and a bit of that,” but the targets that the Government’s infrastructure proposals are looking to achieve would be missed.

If you have created that pipeline, which will be there for the future, I assume that it will require multiyear funding, which you can then guarantee. Has that created its own problems for you?

We have talked about multiyear funding and putting the pipeline in place, but we already know that the Scottish Government has a £1.7 billion deficit in its funding. What reassurances do you have that you can continue to put the funding in place? Given that the Government now has to pay for massive wage inflation and we are trying to help people with the cost of living crisis, it will cut budgets—there is simply no doubt about that. Do you have any assurances that you can continue with the funding programme?

I would like to make a point that I have raised before. Our papers say:

“The SI will be laid in the UK Parliament on 3 October and will come into force on 1 November 2022. According to the Scottish Government, it was not possible to provide the Scottish Parliament with the required 28 days to consider the notification as the ‘policy details were not able to be finalised prior to summer recess’.”

On numerous occasions in this committee, we have talked about the fact that SIs are not laid in time, and I think that it should be noted that, with this instrument, the UK Government has done that again.

Thank you.

Do I have time for a very quick question?