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I think that there is a strong case but, to be honest, it needs to be made a little bit better. Ms Rowand may want to add something on that.

I just want to dig a bit deeper into the £7,400 teaching grant that you mentioned. I guess that the Scottish Government would pay that for all Scottish students and would have been paying it for all EU students in the past. That latter cost will reduce over time. Is the EU contribution part of it a significant chunk of the overall teaching grant that comes in?

A lot of local authorities will have people queueing up at their doors expecting them to be able to do something about rates relief. We see the same thing in relation to the local rates relief schemes that they have the power to introduce but not the money to do so. We heard earlier about the squeeze on local government resources. I am concerned that your members will queue at the doors of local authorities that have no money to offer any schemes.

I guess that the key point is that, if we really want city centre regeneration, we need to have proper schemes in place at a national level because local government cannot afford to provide them.

To go back to the convener’s original question about where the extra money would come from, there is a significant saving to the Scottish Government from not having to pay those fees. Instead, it could increase the rate of the teaching grant per student to make up some of the shortfall without it having to cost the Government any more, because it does not have to pay for EU students.

I guess that there is a little flexibility because the numbers of EU students have reduced.

David Melhuish, I want to talk to you about one of my favourite topics in this committee: non-domestic rates. As you indicated in your submission, I also find it hard to believe that, in just four years, NDR will go up by 25 per cent. There will be a new tone date in one month’s time and revaluation will be a year after that. For NDR to rise by that amount, there are only a few options: either the NDR base, revaluation or the poundage rate will have to increase significantly. Where do you or your members think that the money will come from to pay for that?

A lot of businesses in the north-east are pinning their hopes on revaluation. It has been quite frustrating that that has been delayed for a couple of years.

Another aspect that you point to in your submission is the empty property relief. In the north-east, I have seen plenty of good commercial property being bulldozed to save on NDR. Would devolving that power to local authorities make things better or worse?

I guess that the risk would be too high for people to build speculative developments without knowing that they would have a guaranteed rental at the end.

Secretary of state, you mentioned earlier that meetings are still going on with the devolved Scottish Government. One of the things that I liked about the levelling up fund when I was a leader of a local authority was the fact that we could go directly to the UK Government. For me, that was true devolution. Will that be up for negotiation with the Scottish Government, or is that something that will always be reserved to the UK Government?

As was mentioned earlier, there is always a conflict, in that local authorities have their own priorities, which are set out in their local outcome improvement plans, and the Scottish Government has its own priorities, which are set out in the national performance framework. What you are saying is that it is always the local outcome improvement plan that will determine whether a bid is successful, not the devolved Government’s national performance framework. Is that correct?