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That would be 3 per cent.

That concludes the committee’s questions, but there are a couple of other points that I want to ask about.

First, I want to try and pin the behavioural response issue down a wee bit. In paragraph 35 of your report, you talk about £200 million gross and £82 million net, but, as we know, £74 million of that net figure comes from the new £75,000 band, and £8 million is from the £125,000 to £140,000 band. Where is the gross in those two figures? Are we talking about £8 million out of £40 million, £60 million or whatever? I want to get a better idea of where the tipping point is. I remember being in the Basque Country many years ago and being told, “If you put income tax up by 2 or 3 per cent more than the Spanish average, it does not make much difference, but if you go to 4 or 5 percent, it suddenly goes zzhhh”—that is, it falls away in a kind of reverse Laffer curve, so to speak. That is what I am trying to say. How much of the gross £200 million comes from the £125,000 to £140,000 band and how much comes from the £75,000 band?

Indeed.

Well, I only got it at half past 5 yesterday. [Laughter.]

Basically, then, you are saying that, out of the £143 million, you will generate £74 million, or slightly over 50 per cent, but from the £57 million you will generate only £8 million, which is probably about 13 per cent. That is interesting.

Okay. I got to page 96 of the report, which is on the land and buildings transaction tax. No one has touched on that yet. We are looking at quite a significant decline, from £813 million this year to a predicted £730 million. In other words, there will be an £83 million deficit, which, incidentally, is £1 million more than we will raise from the projected tax increases in the two rates that we have just talked about.

However, you then go on to look at residential tax, which, over the next four years, is forecast to go up by about 56 or 57 per cent—I am just doing the sums in my head. Can you briefly talk us through that? I see that, in paragraph 4.88, you say that you forecast that

“house prices would rise in 2022-23 by 6.0 per cent and transactions fall by 10.8 per cent”,

when, in actual fact, house prices rose by a wee bit more than that and transactions fell by a bit less. Can you talk us through the land and buildings transaction tax element, given that we are talking about a significant amount of money and a significant decrease, going forward into the next financial year?

Fiscal drag and rising earnings—

But, to a large extent, fiscal drag is the reason for the forecast being £2,211 million higher now than it was a year ago.

In paragraph 3.47, you say that pay in the finance sector in Scotland is growing 3.5 percentage points faster than it is in the rest of the UK. In the next paragraph, you mention that, for a while, North Sea oil acted as a drag on earnings, which are coming back up to the average. Will you talk to us about that and the circumstances around that? Why is that happening? Is that likely to continue?

Thank you for that helpful opening statement.

I will turn straight to your report, “Scotland’s Economic and Fiscal Forecasts”—my questions will be mostly based on that. On page 6 of the summary report, in the very first sentence of the introduction, you say:

“The Scottish Government’s budget next year is set to increase by £1.3 billion from the latest position for 2023-24. This is a rise of 2.6 per cent in cash terms or a 0.9 per cent rise after accounting for inflation.”

The point about the rate of inflation is always a bit of a bugbear for me, because it assumes a gross domestic product deflator for inflation of 1.7 per cent, but that does not bear any relationship to the real impact of inflation on the Scottish budget, given that more than half of the Scottish budget is salaries, which are increasing by significantly more than 1.7 per cent. Why does the assumption continue to be 1.7 per cent, given the differential between the GDP deflator and consumer prices index inflation?