Seòmar agus comataidhean

I echo what colleagues have already said and thank you for the evidence that you have given. It is difficult for you to balance your duty of transparency with the duty of care to your own staff in particular, and I think that you have done that well this morning.

Shirley, you have clearly been a very proactive and involved chair, and that is exactly what the SQA has needed, so I welcome that. However, I am interested in the role of the wider board, with regard to not just what has happened with higher history—although that may be a useful example—but how informed the board is, in the first instance, and how involved it is in formulating the organisation’s response to such situations.

Over the past 10 or 20 years, there have been various instances in which some of the criticism of the SQA, including from me, has been about what appears to be a lack of action, or even a lack of interest, from the board, in particular on performance and issues of policy. Historically, the board has focused much more on corporate governance, operational issues and so on, which is an important part of the role but not all of it.

Can you share with us a little bit about what the board is doing now and how involved it currently is in the organisation’s activities?

John Mason correctly predicted where I would be interested in going with my line of questioning. First, I have a question about record keeping. Ahead of the meeting, in preparation to ask questions about council tax, I looked for the commission on local tax reform’s website, which was set up in 2015. The domain has expired and the website does not exist any more, so I am a bit concerned that many of the documents that were associated with the commission have been lost. I was able to find a copy of its report on gov.scot, but it appears that it is there only in response to a freedom of information request. Could the Government commit to reviewing all the documents that were produced by the commission and ensure that those documents are uploaded to gov.scot, so that we have some continuity?

That would be useful. Thank you.

The last time that we had this discussion at committee, you mentioned that Councillor Hagmann was going to lead on cross-party engagement efforts.

That makes sense. The question that I was leading up to was about when Mr Hoy, Mr Marra and I should expect invites to cross-party discussions.

Thank you very much.

That would be very helpful. The only part of the process that has a timescale associated with it is the town hall element of the public engagement, which will happen in the autumn. We are used to those in the public sector saying that autumn can take us up to Christmas eve, but the engagement will happen this year, which is fair enough.

Can you lay out the overall timescale for the other specific elements? For example, for the first part of the process, when do you expect the commissioned experts to come back with something, and when would that be published? Would the open public consultation exercise be held over the summer, or would it run concurrently with the town halls exercise in the autumn? It would be good to get as much detail as possible.

That will be useful. Thank you.

On the substantive point, John Mason was asking about what the Government would define as consensus on the matter. The final line of the commission’s report in 2015 said:

“This is an opportunity that must not be missed.”

From your response to John Mason, it sounds as though you believe that that opportunity was missed in 2015 because of a lack of consensus. However, many of the recommendations in the report had consensus. I accept that there was not agreement between the four parties that were part of the commission—the Conservatives did not participate—and no single unanimous view on what system would replace council tax. However, we all agreed on some of the other recommendations. For example, one of the final recommendations was:

“Further work should be done over the next parliamentary term to assess both general and targeted land value taxes, and their introduction should be given consideration as part of a broadened system of local taxation.”

There was consensus on a range of recommendations, such as those on further policy development work. Do you have any reflections on why that work did not take place?

One of the points that the Government rejected in response to the commission on local tax reform in 2015 was on a revaluation exercise. At that point, the property values that council tax is based on were 24 years out of date—they are now 34 years out of date. In the Government’s view, why has there not been the space, the opportunity or the political bandwidth—whatever it is—to conduct a revaluation exercise in the intervening period?

It seems—correct me if I am wrong—that we all agree that substantial reform will require revaluation. If we are ever to get to the point of replacing or substantially changing council tax, there is no point in the system continuing to be based on valuations from 1991. Given the agreement on that principle, what has prevented us, in the course of the past decade, from starting a revaluation exercise?

I agree with you that the key issue and the elephant in the room is that there would be winners and losers from a revaluation. The direction of travel, as set out in the commission’s recommendations, is that the losers from any change—those who do quite well in the current system—will generally be wealthier people with more social and political capital. That is the reality.

However, no one has ever proposed a cliff-edge revaluation. The commission in 2015 was very clear that any change would require substantial transitional arrangements. For at least 10 years, there has been something approaching a consensus that any substantial change would include a long-term transitional arrangement so that there would be no cliff edge. Given that there would not be a cliff edge—we have already agreed that that should not take place—is it not a source of regret that, 10 years later, we are not any closer to revaluation, never mind replacing the system?

I agree with that and welcome the offer. However, in 2015, the commission on local tax reform undertook an exercise that had not been done before—that level of depth, detail and substantive policy development was unprecedented—and my worry is that, 10 years later, we are in danger of repeating that work in the first part of the process that you announced a few weeks ago.

Can you confirm that the next stage that you mentioned, which relates to commissioning experts to give us a starting point for public discussion, policy development work and so on, will not repeat what the 2015 commission did? When you look at the policy development work that has been done since then, you see that very little has changed.