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Good morning, everybody. My questions are, initially, for our Welsh colleagues, but I would value a response from our Scottish colleagues to look ahead to see what the potential impact for Scotland might be.

The information that we have about the revaluation impact in Wales seems to suggest that authorities such as Monmouthshire County Council could see 40 per cent of households moving up a band in your system. In Wrexham, where Matt is from, it could be 11 per cent. Can our Welsh colleagues offer an explanation to the committee as to why such changes would occur in the system that you have adopted?

I have another question for my Scottish colleagues. If Scotland does a revaluation and adopts a system that is based on property value and property values are much higher, would that put additional pressure on our rebate scheme? Would it be effective? Would it mean giving more rebates if the process were to go along the lines used by our Welsh colleagues?

Thank you for that, Paul. My next question, which is for our Welsh colleagues, is on the impact on local government revenue grants of different income coming to authorities as a result of revaluation. Were there winners and losers among Welsh local authorities with regard to the income that they took from the new council tax system, and were adjustments made to the revenue settlement for local councils in Wales to try to reflect that and rebalance things?

My final question is for our Scottish colleagues. Do you anticipate a similar set of circumstances occurring here, where some Scottish authorities might lose out and some might gain significantly, and that there would be a rebalancing in the revenue support grant for councils to take that into account? Do you anticipate our embarking on that journey as well, Paul?

Thank you for that.

I will go back to my Welsh colleagues. How has Wales solved the problem of people being asset rich because of the value of their property and their ability to pay being based on their income? It has certainly been talked about in Scotland for many years, and has emerged again at the committee in recent weeks. How did Wales deal with that issue?

Unless there are any other comments, I thank you very much for your contributions.

I know from what I have read that that has been followed up. From my perspective as a constituency MSP, it is really important to make sure that the money actually reaches the targets that we hope for.

Another funding announcement was that £90 million would be set aside to reduce economic inactivity. The Deputy First Minister spoke directly about that at the business group meeting, but some colleagues noted that 35 per cent of folk coming back into economic activity are falling back out of the labour market reasonably soon after that. There is a whole variety of reasons why—family, social circumstances, travel, costs, equipment, resources and all of that. That makes for a slightly different question: funding is great, but how do we make sure that the people who we bring back into economic activity are able to stay in it? Is there an issue for us to improve on to make sure that we retain people in the market?

What about retaining people? People come into the job market and suddenly fall back out of it for a variety of reasons. How do we tap into what those reasons are to try to make sure that people stay longer?

There are social issues surrounding productive employment, for example. Does the fund help those aspects? I am not sure. Based on your experience, do we need to do more sideways work to assist people to stay in the job market?

Good morning. I want to raise a couple of points that were discussed at the most recent meeting of the new deal for business group—I have in front of me the minutes of the meeting in January. The question is probably more for Sara Thiam and Colin Borland, who are direct members of the group, but I would appreciate views from the other witnesses.

In the budget, the Scottish Government announced funding of £62 million to support the regeneration of local and small economies by enterprise agencies. Someone at the meeting said that

“most small business members don’t see how this”

funding

“assists them”

at all, either because

“they don’t qualify for rates relief”—

which is a surprise—or because they do not

“fit the client profile of the Enterprise Agencies”.

I invite you to comment on the thinking around that. We are following the public pound here: the Government has announced funding with the purpose of helping small businesses, but members of the new deal for business group are saying that they somehow cannot access that funding. I want to try to understand why that should be and what we can do about it.

Perhaps Sara or Colin could go first.

The issue for me is whether we are choosing the correct model to disburse the money to the small businesses that need it and whether Business Gateway would be a better model, because it is much more closely connected and aligned with constituencies such as mine that do not have the necessary engagement and relationship with enterprise agencies.