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So you get early retirements and a gradual increase in the relative age of the workforce.

If that is the case, Linda, what can we do to resolve or even reverse that?

Fiona Whittaker or Gerry Cornes, do you have a perspective on how to make the workforce more representative of the communities that they serve?

Thanks. Gerry, do you have a perspective on that?

It is good to hear that. Thanks very much for adding that.

I have a question about workforce issues. Way back in 2018, our predecessor committee noted that local authority workforces tend not to reflect the communities that they serve. What can we do to make our workforces, and particularly people in senior positions, more representative of their communities? It seems as though there is a disparity between the two. Do any of our three witnesses recognise that situation from the time of the predecessor committee’s report? Have we made any progress on that to date?

Thanks for your responses to those questions, everyone.

I will ask the same question about the ageing workforce that I asked the previous two witness panels. We heard that there is an ageing workforce in local government, but we are also hearing that local government workers retire early. Earlier, a witness tried to explain the dynamics of why that is the case. Does all that imply that we need to do more to recruit younger people to replace those who retire? I know that that is difficult, because a huge number of local government posts require experience, but what is your perspective on what we can do to turn that around? I will start with Mo Baines again, if that is okay.

It is more about an expression of what we think we need to do to serve our communities better. That seems to explain the disparity in the figures that we see quoted from time to time.

Thank you for that, Johanna. I have a follow-up question that touches on inequalities. Linda Somerville introduced some ideas about the problems that we face with inequalities. The Association for Public Service Excellence’s report on local government highlighted that most local authority staff are women, which we all kind of knew anyway. We also know that there are still inequalities in pay and progression and that there are problems with the gendered segregation of occupations. In some of her earlier comments, Linda offered a few suggestions about how we might overcome those problems. I invite our three witnesses to expand on that. What are we doing to address those continuing inequalities, particularly for women?

Good morning to everyone on this wet and miserable day in Edinburgh. Linda, you opened up with comments about the budget allocations, which were important to hear and get on the record. You mentioned the £1 billion shortfall, and that has been mentioned several times to the committee in the past. The finance circular that accompanies the provisional budget shows a 1.3 per cent real-terms increase from last year to this. Over the past 10 years, the provisional revenue settlement is actually a 4.3 per cent real-terms increase.

Can you explain why there is such a divide between your estimate of the situation and the figures in things such as the finance circulars? How do we get such different figures?