Seòmar agus comataidhean

Agenda item 5 involves formal consideration of the motion on the instrument. I invite the minister to move motion S6M-16547.

Motion moved,

That the Finance and Public Administration Committee recommends that the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010 (Part 2 Further Extension) Order 2025 [draft] be approved.—[Ivan McKee]

Motion agreed to.

That approach would not have to be taken every year, but it would be useful for organisations that have been around for decades.

To be fair, it has always been bolder than us.

If the figure were to be 600,000 tonnes and you put the tax rate up by a fiver, there would be an additional £3 million in revenue for the Scottish Government. Folk will not drive across the border from Motherwell or Aberdeen to save a fiver per tonne—they just will not. It seems sensible to be somewhat bolder on this, and I hope that the Government will look at the rate next year.

The committee will publish a short report setting out our decision on the instrument following the meeting. I briefly suspend the meeting to allow officials to change position.

The next item on our agenda is evidence from the Minister for Public Finance on the draft Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010 (Part 2 Further Extension) Order 2025. The minister is joined by Angus Macleod, head of the public bodies support unit for the Scottish Government. I invite the minister to make a short opening statement.

That has exhausted committee members’ questions, but I still have one or two more.

Going back to the issue that John Mason raised of the £38 million, I think that the concern is not with the policy issue itself but whether the figure is accurate. In other words, the issue is not where you find £38 million, but whether the £38 million—or even the £28 million mentioned—is the right figure.

Even if it were, the Scottish Ambulance Service has said:

“In a time of economic downturn with current budget cuts and constraints it is challenging to imagine how the costs of providing what is outlined in the Bill could be achieved not to mention the ability to develop the associated workforce and infrastructure.”

COSLA, too, has said that

“whilst we agree there would be significant initial costs, we do not agree that there would be a flattening and declining costs in the medium-to-longer term.”

That is notwithstanding the fact that it has access to the same Dame Carol Black report that you have. Moreover, I note that Alcohol Focus Scotland has said that

“estimates for additional investment in services contained in the Financial Memorandum to deliver the aims of the Bill fall short of what is required to ensure equitable access to all of those requiring support.”

You have said that you have used the databases that are available to come up with the £38 million figure, but one of the things that has come through in the evidence that we have received is that there has been an underestimation of on-going and capital support. The Aberdeen city alcohol and drug partnership, which you have touched on, says:

“The Bill uses baseline figures and assumes those figures can all be attributed to a proposed narrow definition of substance use ‘treatment’ with a clinical diagnosis. In reality the current pot of resource available will also go into a wider range of activity drug education, children / family services, justice services, a huge range of third sector services, injecting equipment provision, harm reduction, justice services, consumables, medicines, travel, administration and other indirect costs such as recruitment and training ... To achieve the proposal of all existing funding going into the defined list of ‘treatments’ there would be huge reductions in cross system activity and a significant impact on indirect costs.”

The committee took evidence on the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. As you know, we were unhappy with that financial memorandum, and the Government came back with another. We were also not happy with the Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill’s financial memorandum, because it was not as up to date as it could have been, and we had the cabinet secretary come back to us in that regard. Given the kinds of issue that have been raised in the submissions that we have received, the fact that there appears to be an underestimation in on-going cost—capital and so on—and that, as you said yourself, the financial memorandum was prepared before the change in employer national insurance contributions was perceived, is there an argument for revisiting the financial memorandum?

That would be very helpful to you in getting the bill through. I will not go through the further comments that have been made by the Aberdeen city partnership, but you will know that it has raised a number of concerns around housing, employment, deprivation and the long-term availability of substances. If those issues could be looked at and you could come back with something a lot more robust, that would be very helpful.

I turn to Dame Carol Black’s comments about preventative spend, which, arguably, the bill involves. We and our predecessor committees have wrestled with that topic since 2011, and it is an absolute nightmare. Whenever we look at the budget for the forthcoming year or slightly further ahead, many organisations come to us and say that, if we will just spend X amount this year, they can save us three, four, five, six or seven times more in some indeterminate period ahead. Therefore, if more could be done to pin down the relevant savings over a specific time period, that would also be very helpful.

In saying that, I think that this has been a very worthwhile session, and I appreciate the responses that the committee has received.

Yes, why not? That is something that we should look at.

It is interesting that, in point 3 of the letter from the finance and resilience directorate of the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body, there is a thing called “Ministerial salary sacrifice”. You look reasonably comfortable, despite your hair shirt today, minister. You will be glad to know that the committee had a whip-round for you before you arrived this morning, given the 15-year voluntary—I would put “voluntary” in inverted commas—freeze on ministerial salaries. The letter also says that there is no intention of changing that freeze. In my view, it is hard to see how the public will continue to value the work of ministers if they do not seem to value it themselves.