Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am attending alongside Rachael Hamilton to speak in support of the petition lodged by Kenneth Moffatt, which reflects the real sense of public anger and concern at the culling of wild goats by Oxygen Conservation in February. The petition was signed by more than 13,000 concerned citizens, which is, I believe, one of the largest-ever groups to petition the Parliament and the committee.

The Langholm goats have grazed the hills peacefully and quietly for generations without any significant issues, and with careful and sensitive management. If anyone wants to know more about the history of the goat population in Scotland, I note that the committee has listed on its website a reference to the paper “The ‘Poor Man’s Mart’: history and archaeology of goats in Scotland”, which was authored by Catherine Smith and is useful for putting the issue into context.

In February, we saw those with outside commercial interests go too far in a rush after maximum financial return. They dramatically reduced the goat population for entirely the wrong reasons, and they did so without undertaking proper and meaningful community consultation. The petition that we see before us reflects the community’s response. Worse still, alternatives such as fencing around tree planting or working more closely with neighbouring landowners, including the Tarras valley nature reserve, were not properly explored.

Companies such as the natural capital organisation Oxygen Conservation need to better understand the need to work in partnership with communities in the Scottish Borders and Dumfriesshire rather than work against them, which is what has occurred in this instance. NatureScot and other bodies should not turn a blind eye when those commercial entities do not take cognisance of community concern. Sadly, in this case, I think that NatureScot has done so and that it is too remote and bureaucratic. I encourage the committee to explore that directly with NatureScot.

My constituents feel that, in the case of the hundreds of wild goats that graze the 30,000 acres between Newcastleton and Langholm, NatureScot came down on the side of big commercial and corporate interests rather than serving the local people, who care deeply about their local landscapes and their ecosystem. That reflects the fact that the present processes fail to recognise or understand the strength of local feeling. They fail to recognise and understand how important it is to the local community that the goats are free to roam the Langholm hills. Therefore, anything that the committee can do to address that imbalance must be explored.

The petition makes a strong case for more robust protection measures and processes for locally important species, such as the wild goats of Langholm moor. As Rachael Hamilton said, without some form of designated protection, it is clear that NatureScot and other bodies will not intervene in such cases. In future, important local heritage and biodiversity could be lost. I therefore ask the committee to urge the Scottish Government to grant protected status to this primitive goat species—or, as the goats are described by the popular local newspaper, the Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser, “our feral friends”.

Thank you, convener—life expectancy is something that I am now worried about.

Good morning, gentlemen. In order to balance its budget, the Scottish Government is setting significant store in looking at the Government and public sector workforce. In your submission, you note that

“more detail on size and costs of the workforce ... is useful”

and

“will aid scrutiny”

but

“an approach focused purely on controlling workforce numbers and pay costs will not address capacity issues and is unlikely to be sufficient to put public finances on an even keel”.

Could you elaborate on that and say what more should therefore be done both in relation to the workforce and elsewhere to get the public finances on an even keel?

Good morning, Mr Moxham. I want to discuss how Scottish trade unions enter into discussions with the Scottish Government on pay negotiations. You will be aware that the Government has set a public sector pay target of 9 per cent over the coming—

Mr Kellet, I liked your appeal at the beginning, when you said that you were not necessarily looking for any additional money. That is probably quite reassuring for the Government at this point in time.

I tried to find the evidence session in which this evidence was given to the committee. I cannot remember who gave this evidence, but we had somebody before us who said that one of the tensions in the NHS is the striving for more people—more surgeons, more doctors and more nurses. The analogy that they used was that putting more chefs in a kitchen that has no better equipment or that is not bigger will not necessarily lead to more throughput. Is there a tension because the Government—it is the fault of all of us, to a certain extent—is pressing for more clinicians et cetera when, in order to move towards real preventative spend, we need to change the narrative with the public and say that, actually, the old ways of doing things will not necessarily deliver? We know that we need to bring down orthopaedic waiting lists, for example, so we do need to focus on that, but is there a trade-off and is preventative spend losing the argument at the moment?

Good afternoon. In your statement, you said that you

“have no time for hubris and complacency.”

You are not in post yet, so perhaps you can be a little more open. To go back to John Mason’s point about simplicity in the tax system, I am aware that the Scottish income tax system has more rates than the rest of the UK, including a starter rate that goes from £12,571 to £15,397, which is just 1p in the pound less than the next rate. Various organisations, including ICAS, have said that complexity is not necessarily helpful in the tax system. Is that the sort of complexity that you would advocate that Scottish ministers look at again, given the relatively small difference that it makes to the tax take and to taxpayers?

That leads me to my next question. If you are talking about size, scale and function, one bit that seems to be missing from the debate is the productivity of the Scottish Government workforce. What more could the Scottish Government, supported by bodies such as Audit Scotland, be doing to look at the productivity of the workforce rather than simply its size and cost?

Is there a cultural issue emerging that relates to productivity but also to pay and conditions in the public sector and the private sector in Scotland? We see organisations such as BlackRock now saying that it wants staff back in the office three days a week, and senior management four to five days a week, but we see a different culture perhaps emerging within the Scottish Government. We heard the permanent secretary discussing how difficult it was to get civil servants to agree to go back into the office. We see a possible reduction in the working week in terms of number of days, and we have seen a reduction in the working week in terms of number of hours. Is there a sense that the cultures that are emerging in the public and private sectors in Scotland are at variance, and will that have an impact on the Government’s ability to deliver productivity and efficiency through the public sector?

Is there a risk with all the different documents that come before us, including your reports—when I was on the Public Audit Committee, I could sense your frustration when you came back time and again on the health service or major capital projects and identified the same weaknesses in the system—that we simply cannot see the wood for the trees, because there is so much verbiage, and that a simpler approach to how we set, monitor, report back on and audit goals would be more useful for this committee, Parliament and the public at large?