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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.

The graph gets jagged in the way that it is here.

I suppose that goes back to the point you were making to the convener earlier. If the chancellor had just bitten the bullet and made the substantial tax reform that has not been made in 40 years, we would not need to resolve that much bigger question about the interaction of national insurance and income tax.

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.

Not for the first time.

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.

Thank you very much.

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

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.