Seòmar agus comataidhean

You have balanced the budget now by making in-year cuts. I will come on to some of those cuts in a second. You have frequently mentioned that you have balanced the books. That is wonderful—and you have a legal obligation to do so—but the means of achieving that are to the detriment of public services. As the report says, ministers are spending more than they have to spend. The money has to come from somewhere.

The logic, permanent secretary, is the deficit that exists.

The problem is that they are in-year cuts. Portfolios that are expecting a certain amount of money to perform their functions and meet their objectives are discovering, through spending reviews, either that capital investment projects are being halted or paused, or that there are massive revisions to their budgets.

Exhibit 4 on page 14 of the report has some prime examples of the portfolios that were losing out over the financial years 2022-23 and 2023-24 as a result of in-year changes. This goes back to Ms Stafford’s point about the Government’s priorities. I imagine that one of the key pillars concerned economic growth and finding other ways to generate funding for public services that do not involve tax increases and borrowing.

Looking at the losers in the scenario presented by the table, we see that enterprise, trade and investment, the Scottish Funding Council, learning and energy efficiency and decarbonisation are all receiving funding decreases as a result of that objective of balancing the books. At the same time, that money is being shifted to a massively rising health and social care budget, local government pay awards and pensions. The public are clearly not seeing the immediate benefit of those, but they are seeing the immediate effect of the cuts to those services. In what way is that helping to meet the Government’s key pillars and objectives?

The problem is that all the measures seem to be sticks, not carrots. The Government is bandying about an abundance of sticks.

I will come to the issue of demand management in a moment. We talked previously about measures such as bus lanes and bus gates. The report takes an anecdotal look at those measures in the case studies, but is there any empirical evidence that demonstrates that their implementation—I am thinking, in particular, of the use of bus lanes in city centres—has led to a reduction in car usage and an increase in public transport usage, or has improved air quality, lowered emissions or in any way contributed to modal shift? I am entirely unclear as to whether those measures are working, and that is what people want to know.

However, is the problem not that that comes at the expense of other targets? For example, shifting two lanes of traffic into one lane of traffic increases congestion, which increases emissions from vehicles and so on. Are we looking at this holistically enough?

It is all very well to say that there has been a 5 per cent increase in the use of bus transport in one city. However, at the same time, there might be other issues that are by-products of some of these measures. You do not have to go very far from the Parliament building to see the effect that the low-emission zone has had on roads such as Abbeyhill, which it would previously have taken five minutes to get up, but it now takes 15 or 20 minutes or even more, because people are circumventing the traffic reduction measures. Glasgow is the same, and I am sure that Aberdeen has suffered in a similar manner.

We can pick and choose success measures when it suits us, but are we doing that at the expense of the bigger picture?

Are we not looking at this in completely the wrong way? Should the target not be to reduce emissions from cars, rather than to reduce the number of miles driven by cars? I say that because I am going to make a point about the types of cars that we drive in a moment. Surely the goal is more important than the means to the end. If the point is to reduce emissions, why is the target not a 20 per cent reduction in emissions from domestic car use? That would surely be a more sensible target. There are particular interventions that could deliver that in an easier way than simply setting a very specific target that will not necessarily meet the objective that it is trying to achieve.

That is interesting. I am looking forward to seeing any work that you do on electric vehicles, given what I would call the dire situation in Scotland and across the UK. We need only to look to Norway, which is not far away, where 89 per cent of all new cars sold last year were electric, compared with 24 per cent in the UK. Indeed, only 6 per cent of all vehicles in Scotland are electric or hybrid, compared with more than 40 per cent in Norway, and so on. We also need to look at charging stations and all the issues that go along with that. I am looking forward to that piece of work.

One thing that has struck me during this morning’s session is that you have talked a lot about demand management measures and the carrot-and-stick approach. Some of those measures are not just unpopular—I would argue that they are perhaps punitive and discriminatory. What analysis do you think would need to be done for the Government to be able to consider some of those measures, some of which are reasonably harsh, given that many people who drive a car already consider it to be quite an expensive and punitive thing to do, even if they do it out of necessity?

There is something that I really do not understand. I am not here to support the Scottish Government. However, if I was sitting here representing the Government in this session, I would be saying that it spends more than £1 billion on rail services and that it has publicly subsidised and nationalised two services. I would highlight that the Government heavily subsidises the bus industry, with around 60 per cent of private operators’ revenue coming from concessionary travel or direct grants from national or local government, and that it has numerous concessionary travel schemes that target the young and the old—although those might be people who do not own cars anyway. I would also note that it invests in subsidised ferry services and it invests hundreds of millions of pounds in active and sustainable travel.

However, despite all that Government action, we are going in the wrong direction on the target. The fundamental question is, what on earth does the Government need to do to drive the modal shift that would meet it? I cannot see how it can do that.

I am sorry, but I want to push back on that. The essence of your report is that you say that the point of the target is to reduce the number of miles driven by the general public in their cars, with a view to reducing emissions. It is the emissions reduction aspect that seems to be driving the target and the so-called strategy. Is that right?

I will pick you up on something that was just said, Auditor General. Audit Scotland is calling on the Scottish Government to have a national conversation, but your report says that there has been enough talk and that we need more action, so that call contradicts the essence of your report.