Seòmar agus comataidhean

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?

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 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 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?

On a different note, you heard the evidence from the NASUWT last week. It said that if provision were moved on to a statutory footing and taken away from the system of good will that underpins a lot of it—that is, that teachers and support staff are willing to go on these trips—it would want to open up discussions with the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers on renegotiating teachers’ terms and conditions. That is obviously not factored into the financial memorandum, and there is a potential there for that to be a not insignificant—and perfectly justifiable—additional cost. How do you respond to that? The system of good will does not factor in the point that, in any other job, people are generally paid additionally if they are required to go away for work or work for longer periods of time. That does not happen here at the moment, but moving the matter on to a statutory footing and potentially formalising it, with it being raised at the SNCT, could raise those costs.

I tend to agree with you that this is not likely to be what pushes teachers out of the profession. However, is there not a fairness argument here? A teacher who was to go away on a trip could potentially face increased childcare costs of their own but not be recompensed for them because the matter is not currently formally acknowledged as part of the pay and conditions agreement for teaching staff.

COSLA and ADES, and perhaps some other organisations that made submissions, were keen on a mechanism for annual review, in particular so that any potential issues to do with costs increasing in ways that were not foreseen can be dealt with. Are you amenable to working in an annual review mechanism?

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.

If passed, the bill will induce quite a lot of demand in the sector. As you point out, there is bed capacity at the moment but there is not a huge surplus, so existing providers would have to expect quite a lot of additional demand. Some of the submissions that came to us raised the possibility that some providers might seize the opportunity to increase their rates, which might take us beyond the cost range set out in the financial memorandum. What is your response to that? There is an opportunity for providers to significantly increase their rates if they know that there is an obligation on the state to provide outdoor learning and that there are not many other places to go.