Seòmar agus comataidhean

I think that I should come back to you with more detail than I can provide today.

I have already set out our tax position: we will not change tax rates or bands for the duration of this parliamentary session. Obviously, I cannot speak for an Administration beyond May 2026.

I would not usually express this in these terms, because there are constraints, but, given the scale of the Scottish Government’s overall budget, we are still talking about a very small element of it. Does that mean that we do not have to make changes elsewhere? No. We should make those changes anyway. We should be driving efficiencies, and we have to change the size and shape of the workforce, for all the reasons that we understand in relation to sustainability and affordability. Reforming public services through delivering them in a different way is the right thing to do, regardless of whether we need to create headroom for social security support, because that will be more efficient and will deliver a better service to the public. I will come back to that in some detail in the fiscal sustainability delivery plan, alongside the MTFS.

The child disability payment is paid to much smaller numbers of people than the adult disability payment is, as it is for children who have profound and challenging disabilities. The figure requires some explanation, and further detail needs to be set out. I do not have that to hand, but I will come back to you.

You are right that we should always look at the evidence base on the impact of a benefit payment. I hope that we are monitoring this, and I will cover it in my answer in writing, but I would expect the child disability payment to be supporting families out of poverty and supporting them with their mental health. It is intended to help with all the things that you would expect it to help families with when their costs of living are higher than those of other families. The evidence should be there and I expect that it is being gathered, but I will check and come back to you.

Okay. I will pick that up.

The Scottish Retail Consortium also said that

“there is much ... that retailers can get behind”

in the budget, and it called for people to support it.

Well, I know—so can I.

Those things are absolutely a balance. The support that we give to retail—the small business bonus scheme, a lower poundage, the work that we are doing on retail crime, the fact that we are not proceeding with the public health supplement and so on, all of which have been welcomed by the sector—is considerable. We want to ensure that we are supporting the sector as far as we can within the resources that we have.

As part of the consultation on any further powers for local government, we would expect to hear from the business and retail sectors about where that is an issue, and we would take decisions in the round. I feel that the response from the Scottish Retail Consortium is quite pragmatic. It had a big concern about the public health supplement coming at the wrong time, so our not proceeding with it has shown that we have listened, which is a good thing.

No. The policies support at least 92 per cent of premises, so the bulk of them will benefit from one of the policies. The reason why I was persuaded to support hospitality in that way was that, out of all sectors, it is still recovering from Covid. Brexit has had a major impact, too, particularly on establishments that are in island communities—the effects of the cost of food and transport, inflation and other impacts on overheads are particularly felt by island hospitality businesses.

Hospitality businesses can very much be at the heart of our communities in the islands and, indeed, of rural communities, which is the point that you made. That is why we have decided to support the sector and deliver the policy in the way that we have.

The basic rate captures the vast majority of local pubs and restaurants but excludes some of the very large premises and chains that have a resilience that those smaller businesses perhaps do not. The policies capture 92 per cent of hospitality premises—that means not just pubs, cafes and restaurants, but bed and breakfasts. It is a balanced approach.

In the light of competing priorities and the need to have a balanced and fair budget, we have done what we can to support as many hospitality premises as we can in a way that is affordable. Going further would have meant that we could not spend money on winter fuel payments, for example. There is a balance.

Our aim is to reduce the civil service workforce through our recruitment controls, and we are working hard to do that. We started with the contingent—in other words, temporary—workforce, which we have reduced by about 40 per cent. Extended enhanced recruitment controls are in place to try to contain the workforce and reduce its size. I do not have a figure, but I expect the trajectory to be downwards.

In general terms, this is about priorities, so we have—

That will be done, first, through the prioritisation of that policy, but also through the other steps that I laid out on fiscal sustainability. Do I accept that, for all our policies, we have to create headroom through changes in the way in which we deliver services? Yes, I do. Earlier, I set out seven such areas, which I will return to in more detail in the fiscal sustainability plan. The work on workforce, public service reform, efficiencies, doing things differently and health and social care reform will all help to reduce costs and ensure that we deliver and prioritise investment not just in social security but in front-line services.