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Thank you.

On the wider point, do you acknowledge that the bill has, among other things, raised the profile of the fact that we currently rely on a huge amount of good will and volunteering from classroom teachers to take their classes away on such trips? Regardless of the outcome of the bill, however enthusiastic I am about it, there is a need to address the fact that we expect a huge amount from teachers, over and above what is currently in their contracts.

I want to follow up on the line of questioning from Miles Briggs around teachers. Minister, I presume that the trade union to which you referred is the NASUWT. In its evidence to the committee, the NASUWT was clear that it felt that if the bill was passed and outdoor education provision was moved on to a statutory footing, that would require the renegotiation of teachers’ terms and conditions at the SNCT.

What is the Government’s position on that? Do you agree with the union that passage of the bill would require the issue of terms and conditions to be raised at the SNCT, with a view to potential renegotiation?

I agree with that: there is obviously a tension, because we are trying to reset relationships and give local government more flexibility. You can understand the scepticism when the Scottish Government raises such issues, given the many other areas of spending in which the Government prescribes to local government. Councils do not have a choice about the 1,140 hours of early years and childcare, for example: Parliament agreed to that. There is an on-going debate about how the £145 million for teachers is spent, with the spectre of a clawback of that money.

Will you elaborate on why the proposals in the bill are potentially overreach, in terms of national Government directing local government, while all the other areas that I have mentioned, even just within the education, children and young people portfolio, are not?

Sticking with national insurance contributions, and accepting that the primary goal was to raise revenue, if the UK Government had taken a different approach, would it have had the same kind of consequences? For example, it could have lifted the 2 per cent cap on earnings above £50,000, albeit that that would have raised perhaps not quite half of what the employer national insurance contribution increase does. The primary impact will be on sectors with large numbers of people on lower incomes of far less than £50,000.

I will switch to a different area entirely. I am flying somewhat blind, because I have tried to open so many of your reports of 200-ish pages from the previous few years that my laptop is really struggling to cope.

On land and buildings transaction tax, your projections have generally been relatively bullish, yet it still seems to be increasing and overperforming year on year—pretty consistently to the tune of about a billion pounds. If I look at the 2022 LBTT projections versus the projections in the most recent report, there is a fairly consistent gap of about a billion pounds, which is replicated if you go back through previous reports. What work have you done to look at the LBTT projections and the methodology behind them, because, although it is positive that it is overperforming, there is a relatively consistent overperformance?

Good morning.

I return to the issue of national insurance contributions and your projections of around 50,000 lost hours in the labour market. To what extent do you take into account potential secondary effects? For example, there is acute concern about the effect on the social care sector. If social care employers struggle to pay those costs, it will result in a reduction in the number of staff in a sector that already struggles to attract enough staff, which will also result in other individuals having to withdraw from the labour market to become unpaid carers to family members. Are those second-order effects taken into account? To what extent are you able to project such issues?

Sorry, I said a minute ago that there was a gap of about a billion pounds, but the gap for Scotland is pretty consistently about £100 million.

I return to Craig Hoy’s point around public sector pay. One of the challenges for both Governments is that any figure that is put into a budget to account for public sector pay will immediately be taken by trade union negotiators as a floor rather than a ceiling. Therefore, there is a tension between Governments being able to put enough money aside to have genuine negotiation versus the transparency that everybody else requires out of a budget process. Do you have any advice for either Government in that regard?

I agree that the vast majority of centres are run by extremely motivated people and that a lot of them are social enterprises and are not for profit in the first place.

However, there is an issue. You were at the Education, Children and Young People Committee last week when I raised the issue of Blairvadach, which is a Glasgow City Council-run centre near Helensburgh. Part of the challenge there is that every time they have a school trip in, they cannot use the space commercially, and they obviously make far less out of the school trips than they do out of commercial bookings. People want providers to keep the rate as low as possible to make it accessible to schools, but inducing demand from schools potentially increases the challenges to those centres around their commercial viability, because there is simply less space for them to take private bookings.

I agree that such pressures have always existed, but the point of putting the provision of residential outdoor education on a statutory footing is to induce demand to ensure that more young people get that experience. However, that will result in more pressure, to the extent that a tipping point might be reached at which the teaching unions want teachers’ involvement in such provision to be formally recognised.

I want to come back on the issue of equality and inclusion. You mentioned that, in the overall costings, there was an acknowledgement that not every model of outdoor education is at the high-cost end, which involves going to a centre some distance away from the school. Children could camp close to the school, which would still be of immense value but would come at a lower cost.

My only concern, though, is whether there is the potential for these things to be disproportionate. In those schools where parents have the means to fund additional transport costs, they will be able to go further out and potentially get a higher-quality residential experience, whereas children at a school in, say, a more deprived urban community, for whom going to a centre will obviously involve a significant amount of travel, might be steered towards the lower-cost model of camping nearby. I do not mean to diminish the value of that, but is there not a risk of people having an unequal experience?