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Cabinet secretary, I recognise that you have a recusal in relation to the Promise.

I am sorry to cut you off, cabinet secretary. I welcome all that new work—particularly the work on AI, which was obviously not relevant when the 2014 report was produced—but my worry is that we are going to go through the same process of having working groups, reviews and consultations to come up with new ways of reducing teachers’ workload and then not implement them, just as we did not implement most of the 2014 work. Why has the Government not just taken that 2014 report, dusted it off and implemented what is still to be done and what is still relevant? It feels as though there must be low-hanging fruit there.

I take your point that a lot of that bureaucracy is driven by local authorities, but you have heard me say previously that, in a lot of cases, that is because they have bolted things on to the Scottish Government’s requirements. We disagree, in principle, on Scottish national standardised assessments, but the Government’s position is to deliver them. That is fine, but why has the Government not set a condition saying that local authorities are not allowed to bolt on to them all sorts of additional reporting requirements? That is one of the drivers of teachers’ workload—not the testing itself, but everything that has been built around it.

It is our union colleagues who do not want an independent chair, so I expect that they probably would not have been pressing the point.

I appreciate that. We had lengthy on-the-record debates at stage 2, and we will also have them ahead of stage 3, so I will not press you with questions on the particulars of the bill.

One long-running issue is the National Joint Negotiating Committee structure and the question of an independent chair. You have rightly observed that industrial relations seem to have improved. We have gone through almost a decade of having national industrial action every year. To put it one way, there were clearly profound interpersonal problems at the NJNC. One of the key recommendations from the “Lessons Learned” report was to establish an independent chair. Employers were happier with that recommendation than the unions were, as has been much discussed in the Parliament. It is not the only potential reform that could be made. Are you able to say anything at this point about the Government’s intentions to take forward in full—or as close to full as you can—that report’s recommendations on the NJNC, whether they be those for an independent chair or its other recommendations?

I will switch to a totally different area: national insurance. Various changes have been made by both the current Labour UK Government and the previous Conservative UK Government in its final couple of years, including tweaks around national insurance. A lot of the chancellor’s changes seem to be driven by the main objective of raising revenue without making the most politically unpalatable income tax changes.

Why do you think that the Government has not touched the upper earnings limit? There could be political pain from any of those options, but revenue could be raised by adjustments to the upper earnings limit. A lot of the other changes that have been made on salary sacrifice will result in a much lower yield for what is probably the same amount of political pain.

Not for the first time.

Thank you very much.

Indeed. Before I start talking about the council tax, I will hand back to you, convener.

What about the question on fuel duty? There will be a gradual reversal of the 5p temporary cut to it, but after that it will still be at 2010 levels.

I will follow up on the point about being able to track from the input to the output, disentangling policies and their impact. I was a little bit surprised by the IFS’s reaction to one particular policy, on road user charging for electric vehicles. If I recall your comments at the time correctly, you welcomed the chancellor doing something in that space, albeit that it was heavily caveated in that she was probably not doing it in the ideal way.

To me, there is quite a disconnect there. There is an argument for road user charging across the board, but if we single out EVs the UK Government’s own projection shows that such an approach will depress EV uptake by about 300,000 or 400,000. That blows a hole in the UK Government’s climate targets as well as in the Scottish Government’s climate targets, both of which are heavily dependent on reducing the use of combustion-engine cars. The Scottish Government had a 20 per cent car reduction target and has dropped that, but it still has the ambition in that space. The chancellor has taken that measure while still freezing fuel duty, effectively. She will gradually reverse the 5p temporary cut from the Sunak Government but, even after that, fuel duty will still be at 2010 levels.

Is there not quite a disconnect there? Okay—that policy will raise revenue, albeit through an administratively complex mechanism, but it will take the Government backwards in other areas where it has put itself under strict statutory obligations.