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Amendments 294 to 298 would variously amend the Inshore Fishing (Scotland) Act 1984, the Aquaculture and Fisheries (Scotland) Act 2007 and the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010.

I am grateful to the Sustainable Inshore Fisheries Trust and the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation for their support in developing the amendments on the basis of their considerable insight and experience in the area. Between them, the amendments seek to update and future proof our approach to marine enforcement, particularly around fines and forfeiture when fishing laws are broken.

I am not proposing anything brand new here; I am just seeking to fix what has not worked in practice or what is now badly outdated as a result of the legislation having been passed some decades ago.

I have a particular regional interest in that I am very proud of Arran’s Lamlash Bay no-take zone, which is a great example of marine restoration. It is locally led by the Community of Arran Seabed Trust. However, in November last year, a skipper was caught illegally harvesting scallops in the no-take zone. He was issued a £10,000 fine by the marine directorate but he refused to pay it, so he went to court. He pled guilty to the offence at that point, but, astonishingly, he was then fined only just over £4,000, despite the estimated retail value of the scallops that were illegally fished and sold at market being £15,500. He made a profit of more than £10,000 by breaking the law.

At the risk of sounding like my colleagues to either side of me, I do not think that crime should pay. Inadequate fines and forfeiture mean that the risk of being caught breaching our existing marine conservation efforts is really just the cost of doing business for bad actors. They can afford to take that hit.

The amendments are a package of measures that are designed to rectify that situation and prevent it from happening again. Previous acts have set out fixed pounds-and-pence figures for fines and monetary penalties, but, the moment a bill is passed, those figures begin to go out of date. Inflation erodes their relative value. For example, the £5,000 fine that is set out in section 4 of the 1984 act should be £16,500 in today’s money to maintain the value that was agreed by MPs at that point. Instead, it has lost more than two thirds of its relative value and, therefore, more than two thirds of its effectiveness.

For consistency, amendment 294 would bring such fines into line with the £50,000 limit set for equivalent offences in the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010. It would also fix the infamous enforcement issue when someone is caught illegally fishing and with catch on board. Currently, the burden is on the prosecution to prove that all the fish were caught illegally, but amendment 294 would flip that. If someone was caught fishing illegally and with catch on board, it would be presumed that it had all been caught illegally unless they could prove otherwise—for example, through remote electronic monitoring data.

Amendment 298 would extend the imposition of fines for breaches of the 2010 act from just the master to include the owner and, if relevant, the charterer of a vessel. The decision to fish illegally within MPAs is often made at a more senior level than a vessel’s master, but fines are typically imposed solely on that master. Amendment 294 would disincentivise owners of vessels from encouraging or, at the very least, condoning illegal fishing.

Amendment 297 follows the same approach as amendment 298 with regard to disposals, but, in this case, it would extend fixed-penalty notices to the vessel’s owner and charterer, if applicable.

Amendment 295 would uprate the maximum fixed penalty associated with the 1984 and 2010 acts from £10,000 to £13,000, given that it is now more than a decade out of date, having last been updated in the 2010 act. More important, the amendment would require ministers to review the maximum at least once every five years and to take into account matters such as inflation in uprating the maximum via regulations.

Finally, I will pick up on Michael Marra’s line of questioning and the points that you made—I think that it is the very first recommendation in your report—about better alignment between tax and economic policy. I have perhaps asked similar questions in the past. Is it possible to align tax policy with the national strategy for economic transformation? By that I mean, is the NSET specific and tangible enough to be aligned with? It is very abstract and broad brush. If I am thinking, “Right, I am a Scottish Government tax official and I need to align tax policy with what is in the NSET,” I would not be entirely clear what I was trying to align with.

On a totally different note, I will pick up on various bits of the conversation about public understanding. Either last year or the year before, I mentioned to you some of the challenges around the media’s reporting of your publications, especially regarding underspend and the difference between technical underspend and the cash-in-a-pot-that-is-still-sitting-there kind of underspend. Have you done any additional work on how that is communicated to the media and to politicians? Obviously, politicians have other incentives to portray certain numbers in certain ways. When we talked about that last year, it was about the impact that that had had on public sector pay negotiations at the time: a headline says, “Scottish Government underspends by £1 billion” while a group in the public sector cannot negotiate to get £100 million for their pay deal.

I take on board that it is a decision for the Government. I would be interested in your view though, on whether you think that that would aid public understanding of the process. Take NDR as the example, because it has the narrowest range of ready reckoners that just look at whether the poundage rate goes up a bit or down a bit. The debate each year tends not to focus on that, however, but more on whether specific sectors should get a relief or a levy attached, and so on. In general, those are the key decisions that are made during budget negotiations. The classic issues are whether the hospitality sector should get relief in any particular year and whether relief applied down south should be applied up here.

Would it be valuable if the Government expanded the ready reckoners into areas such as those, particularly when there are proposals in the public domain that have come not necessarily from the Government but the hospitality sector or the Scottish Trades Union Congress, or whoever it might be? Would it be helpful if the Government then projected those proposals and included them in the reckoners?

Yes, I think that we have all been guilty of saying additional rate at various points, but it has always been the top rate, since it has been devolved.

I will jump around again. Richard Robinson mentioned the ready reckoners. I am interested in your view of whether what the Government currently publishes as ready reckoners do the job that is needed, particularly in terms of public understanding, to which they are key. The projections around some of the potential changes to income tax are relatively detailed, in so far as they lay out 15 or so scenarios. On non-domestic rates, I think that there are only three scenarios, which is very narrow. Have you had any discussions with the Scottish Government about changes that it could make to the ready reckoners, perhaps by broadening out the range of scenarios?

Just to push on that a little bit, it does sound like you are saying that the Government has not articulated its economic strategy in those terms and that it has not drawn that very obvious link between some sectors being more valuable to us in terms of devolved taxes than others and therefore prioritising those sectors. Have you ever heard the Scottish Government express it in those terms?

On that point about the fiscal framework and the incentives that it provides, normally, any Government is incentivised to grow the economy to increase tax revenue. That is not exactly the case for the Scottish Government. If you take two growth sectors in Scotland—video games versus film and television—the number of staff that you require per product in the video game sector is a lot lower than in the film and TV sector. Therefore, the video game sector is much more lucrative in terms of tax revenue when it comes to corporation tax, which is of no value to us, whereas film and TV require far more people on medium-ish salaries and therefore have a higher income tax yield.

Have you ever seen the Scottish Government articulate its economic objectives in terms of—to be cynical—how to game the fiscal framework? In other words, identify which sectors will be the most valuable not just to the Scottish economy, but to Scottish public services in terms of the impact that growth in those sectors would have on devolved taxes versus reserved taxes. We cannot prioritise every sector; one of the criticisms of the NSET is that it prioritises everything. It does not make choices like, “Do we prioritise video games or film and TV, and what would the relative impact on tax revenues be?”

Good morning. I will be happy to be proved wrong on this one because it has been bugging me, although I think that I have I figured it out. In exhibit 10, the two tax policy changes are referred to as changes to the “additional rate” and to the “top rate”. Are you talking about the same rate for both those policy changes? Although the additional rate exists in the rest of the UK, in Scotland we have always referred to the top rate. From what I have been able to figure out, the information is drawn from an SFC report that uses “additional rate” when it means “top rate”. Can I just check that we are, in both lines in exhibit 10, talking about what in Scotland we refer to as the top rate?

That was not my main question; it has just been bugging me and I have been trying to figure it out.

Exhibit 10 is about lost revenue from behaviour change. Obviously, it would be better to have £65 million than £11 million, but it is still £11 million that we would not have had otherwise. What would be useful to know in weighing up the policy change is what if any other negative impacts there have been. Has the behaviour change at the upper end—for example, if consultants in the NHS have reduced their hours to avoid higher tax—had an impact on the provision of services? Does it have an impact on spending in the real economy and therefore a knock-on impact on business? Is it possible to quantify any of that, or are we getting far too far into secondary effects? Without being able to quantify any negative effects of the policy, all that we can say is that £11 million is not as good as £65 million, but it is still £11 million that we would not otherwise have had and where is the harm?