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Thank you for that. To continue the theme of concerns that have been raised by business groups, one company told us that the bill appears to be offering “localism for localism’s sake”. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the concern that the proposal for local flexibility and variations might lead to confusion and complexity for customers and businesses.

I wish to return to the point about the flat rate and the percentage rate. Something interesting came up with COSLA, in our previous panel, involving a request for ultimate flexibility and the ability to choose a flat rate or a percentage rate at the local level. I take your and others’ point that we are trying to create something that is user-friendly, simple, efficient and so on.

COSLA said that there are on-going discussions in quite a number of areas, but I wonder whether there has been discussion of the potential for an information technology platform for the process of calculating, collecting and auditing. If one local authority went for a flat rate and another went for a percentage, a digital IT platform could take the difficulty out of that. COSLA mentioned that it is exploring that with its digital IT team. Has the expert working group had any discussions about exploring the possibility of using IT to help us in that way?

I call Miles Briggs.

I appreciate you all coming this morning. Thank you so much, minister, for your thorough and in-depth responses. I get a sense that there are some areas where our questions have shown that more work needs to be done. It will be interesting for us to consider that in our report and to reflect that back to you.

Thanks very much for those responses. We are obviously very concerned about the relationship with local authorities.

I call Willie Coffey.

Good morning, and welcome to the 27th meeting in 2023 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. Mark Griffin and Stephanie Callaghan are joining us online.

I invite Marie McNair and Stephanie Callaghan to draw members’ attention to their interests.

There are a number of members of the task force on the panel, so I would be interested in hearing how the task force came to recommend increased partnership working and why the group was not able to agree on a recommendation to expand the SSPCA’s powers. What were the key concerns and how are they addressed under the proposed compromise position?

I ask Susan Davies to start.

As Jim Fairlie has touched on the area that I wanted to cover in this section, I will ask another question.

We have heard some stakeholders calling for fruit and veg to be subsidised by the Scottish or UK Government. Indeed, a paper from Warwick university found that doing so would cost taxpayers roughly £2.5 billion a year, compared with the £6 billion a year that is spent on treating illness related to poor diet. I am interested in hearing your views on that. Would supermarkets support the Government subsidy of fruit and veg?

It is great to hear that both of you are giving farmers that premium price, but do you think that we could go further if there were regulation across the board that meant that everybody had to do it? By that, I mean regulation in general, leaving organics aside.

One thing that you have talked about this morning is the challenge around the competitive market margins. If there were regulation in certain situations that could help all of you take that step together, do you think that that would help us move things along? We have incredible climate targets, and agriculture plays a big role in reaching them.

Does anybody else want to come in with thoughts on that?