Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good afternoon and welcome to the 23rd meeting in 2022 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. The first item on our agenda is to take evidence from the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth on the Scottish Landfill Tax (Prescribed Landfill Site Activities) Amendment Order 2022. Mr Arthur is joined by Robert Souter, who is a senior tax policy adviser at the Scottish Government. I welcome them both to the meeting, and I invite Mr Arthur to make a short opening statement.

It would be useful, because the people who are most mobile, who are also the people who could pay or be liable for the highest level of taxation, are always of significant interest.

I am intrigued that Susan Murray’s submission mentions open data. It says that

“over 95% of the data that could be open is still locked up, at an ... annual cost to the Scottish economy of just over £2bn.”

I was struck by the size and scale of that figure. I took it that you meant the wider Scottish economy, not just the public sector, but if that is the case, what is the split, how can or should that data be opened up and over what timescale do you envisage that happening?

I am sorry to interrupt you, but will you put that into perspective in terms of the overall budget of South Lanarkshire Council?

Given the amount of money involved and the pressure on our finances, I think that, complicated or not, it is something that we have to look at, is it not?

One of the issues about ensuring that the funding is transparent and easy to audit is the fact that some of it sits in education and some of it sits in social work, so there is an issue about how the funding is traced. I realise that there is a local financial return in which the direct costs are accounted for; however, that is not always specific or easy to follow, given that different councils have different methodologies. What improvement will be made to that situation?

While we are talking about that issue, is there space in local authority budgets for some key areas to be worked on? It has been said that the current allocation of funding is not flexible enough. For example, last week, we were advised by COSLA that a lot of children require speech and language support but that it feels that the money cannot be used for that and that the ELC grants are not flexible enough to take into account the number of children in specific areas who have such issues.

The Scottish Private Nursery Association made a significant submission when the committee asked for evidence, on which I want to touch briefly. It gave us a series of recommendations. One of them is that the Scottish Government should either

“Directly set the rate which all children will receive for their 1,140 hours”,

or

“Provide funding ... direct to parents through either a voucher scheme or ... an online portal which allows nurseries to be funded directly.”

Could you comment on that?

There have been a number of comments about whether there should be a standard rate, which, as I said at the start of the meeting, would have to take into account things such as rurality, additional needs and so on. I raise that point because we got a table that shows what local authority spending on early learning and childcare would be if all children were funded at the private, voluntary and independent sector rate, and the picture is quite stark.

The SPNA compared how much local authorities would spend in their area if everyone were funded at the same rate as the PVI sector in that area. The result is astonishing. I will give you two examples of the variance. Both East Renfrewshire Council and Comhairle Nan Eilean Siar give £5.31 an hour to the private sector, but if they both gave the same amount of money to the public sector—that is, the local authority—that would cost 45 per cent less in Eilean Siar and 22.5 per cent more in East Renfrewshire. Basically, that shows that East Renfrewshire appears to get more for the private sector per child than for the public sector, but the Western Isles appears to get significantly less. Do those colossal variances—more than 20 per cent higher in one local authority and minus 40 per cent in another—not show that more work has to be done on rates, as you suggested earlier? How do we go about ensuring that we do not have such huge disparities between the sectors?

Good morning and welcome to the 21st meeting in 2022 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee—our final meeting before recess.

Our first agenda item is a final evidence session on post-legislative scrutiny of the financial memorandum for the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill—now the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014—with a specific focus on the early learning and childcare provisions.

Following our meeting last week, we asked the minister to attend, but, due to the short notice, she was unable to do so. However, I am delighted to welcome Alison Cumming, director of early learning and childcare at the Scottish Government. I understand that you would like to make a short opening statement, Alison.

Okay. I have not mentioned issues such as standard rates, the need to look at both the setting and whether the child has any additional needs, rurality and so on. However, I think that I have asked enough questions for now, so I will give my colleagues an opportunity to ask some of those questions.

Thank you very much for that opening statement. I will start with some questions, most of which will be based, as you would expect, on the evidence that we received last week.

One of the issues that I raised is the absence of a single standard funding formula, which will brought in this financial year, apparently. Why has it taken so long to develop that? I ask that question because an issue that was raised is that funding for ELC is in different budget lines. You have talked about transparency but, clearly, that is an issue. That aspect seems to have developed further—that is more the case since the 1,140 hours provision came forward than it was with the 600 hours provision. Will you touch on that first, please?

Is there any idea of what that bureaucracy costs and the impact across Scotland? Is there any measure of that?