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This has been touched on quite a few times already, but I want to come back to the case load issues that social workers have. Stephen Smellie, you mentioned in your opening comments that the reality is that a lot of social workers do a huge amount of overtime, and many families do not get to see their social worker from week to week or, sometimes, for even longer periods of time.

I will ask this question in two parts. Would anybody like to expand on the comments that Stephen made at the start about the reality for social workers who have a case load beyond their capacity, and consider what the present system should be doing formally about that?

Given the reality, which is that caseworkers are working overtime and families are not getting to see them, what policies and processes are in place for when a case load is far beyond capacity? Is there nominally—at least on paper—a process for dealing with that? If so, is that process not working? Is there an assumption that case loads are always manageable?

I will follow up on that point. The financial context, especially over the past three years, has been one in which there have been significant in-year cuts to budgets. Money that has been allocated at the start of the financial year has not been distributed. Willie Rennie mentioned the whole family wellbeing fund. I imagine that the answer to this question is relatively obvious, but it is important to get it on the record. What impact is the current public finance situation having, in particular on our ability to deliver effective preventative spend?

To follow up on the issue of expectation, is it an issue that budgets are often set in the knowledge, almost from day 1, that the money that has been allocated is never going to be distributed? Let us say that a promise is made that £10 million will be provided for project X, but, realistically, only £6 million is ever going to be available. Would it be more helpful to say from the start that it is going to be £6 million, not £10 million, or is there something helpful in encouraging the system to be ambitious? What would you require to make the kind of change that is needed? What would you do with £10 million if you had it?

Part of my frustration with a lot of this is that it appears that a huge amount of time is wasted and morale is drained when people expect to be given resources to deliver something and they are either not given them at all or they are given something far less and they have to rewrite a plan that they have spent time developing.

I will turn to a different topic, with a question that is primarily for Fraser McKinley—it is about the progress framework. On the Plan 24-30 website, the last line on the relevant page says that the framework will be available

“by the end of 2024.”

Is that still the expected timescale? Will we see it in the next fortnight?

I hope that this is just a yes or no question, convener. It is about communication with the profession. Am I right in understanding that there is no way for the SQA to communicate directly with everyone who teaches history in Scotland? You can communicate with schools and subject-specialist associations, and with your own markers, but there is, at present, no mailing list of every history teacher in Scotland.

That is really positive and helpful. I am sure that we all look forward to seeing that. The committee is well used to people coming to us to apologise for delays, so it is positive to hear that that is on track. We will probably want to follow that up in the new year, once we have had a chance to look at the framework.

Sticking with technology as an example of reform, I totally take on board Stephen Smellie’s point that the key solution is more funding for more staff, but let us be pessimistic for a moment and say that this afternoon’s budget announcement is not going to include a transformational additional settlement for local government that gets passed down to social work.

You have talked about a number of areas of potential reform that would make the system more productive and make it easier for social workers to cope with the workload. Are there any other areas of potential reform that have not been mentioned so far that you would like to raise with the committee?

Does anyone else want to come in on the point about resources and expectation management?

I have two final questions. The first sticks with HMRC and relates to two studies that it did on the potential behavioural impact on migration from income tax. One of them showed an immediate net negative effect on migration in 2018-19 for higher earners, but then essentially no effect in 2019-20. The second study showed positive inward migration of higher earners up to 2021-22.

The first study shows what appears to be, on first reading, an immediate negative behavioural impact on migration for higher earners in 2018-19. Should we discount that, given that, although some behavioural changes happen immediately, that does not generally happen with migration, and given everything else that was happening at that point, particularly around Brexit, as well as the fact that the effect did not reoccur the following year? Should we assume that what appears to be an immediate behavioural impact on migration resulting from the 2018-19 tax changes was, in fact, down to other factors and was probably unrelated to income tax that year, and that the longer-term studies are a better indicator?

That is useful. Thank you. The SFC assumptions about behaviour change and some in your work are because we have limited evidence in Scotland, so far. Are you aware of any UK-wide and international evidence that significant differences in sub-state and state-level changes in tax policy make a difference to people moving over the border from France to Belgium when France increases its income tax rates, for example, compared with people moving between cantons in Switzerland? Is there a significant difference in the effect on behaviour, particularly migration?