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I looked this up and found an example from 2021, which is not exactly recent, when the average cost of constructing a house in Edinburgh was £126,400 but the average sale price was £375,870. That is more than three times the construction cost. I am well aware that other costs are involved, but those figures show a 197 per cent profit. I do not for a minute accept that that is the real profit, but we are looking at £3,500 out of a price that was £375,000 in Edinburgh four years ago. Developers will pass that on to buyers, and the reality is that no one will put a house up for sale for less than the cost of building it.

You sent a really detailed and excellent 26-page submission full of facts and figures. What impact do you see on the elasticity of demand? Do you think that the levy will reduce demand by 5 or 10 per cent, or will it have no impact? What is your view of the impact on actual demand?

When you say “homes”, you are talking about homes for sale. All the submissions talk about the fact that 44 per cent of housing in Scotland is classed as affordable, compared to 19 per cent in England. Should affordable housing be included if the levy is implemented? That seems to be the implication of what you have said.

Ms Kell, in your submission, you state:

“The exemption of affordable housing, which is more than twice the size of that in England, in terms of its proportion of the market, does not reflect the reality of the make-up of the Scottish market which differs from England. This also ignores that UK Government seeks to substantially grow the tax base in England, through its ambition to deliver 1.5m homes.”

Over five years, that would require 75,000 houses to be built each quarter in England. In fact, however, 43,030 houses were built in quarter 2 last year in England, and the figure has fallen to 36,180 in quarter 1 this year, which is less than half of the target. That is not really much of an example to follow.

Indeed, the people who build those homes will be paying income tax, council tax and all the rest of it. Therefore, if they are not building houses, they will not be paying those taxes, which will also have an impact.

I am really keen to get fired into your submissions and go through them all in great detail. However, because of our time restrictions and the fact that I am dead keen to let my colleagues come in, I shall leave it at that.

In my area, the council is about £6.8 million down, even after the Scottish Government has made those payments, which accounts for about 54 per cent of the increase in council tax this year. What has been the practical impact of that across the board?

Let us move on. Technical adjustments increased the budget by £246.8 million. Will you talk us through what those technical adjustments are and what that really means?

I understand that. Of today’s six witnesses, Hazel Johnson is the only one whose submission has been supportive of the levy. The submissions from the other five witnesses are not supportive. What is your view on who should pay for the work that needs to be done? We have heard it suggested that everyone from architects to manufacturers to companies that were involved in previous construction should pay. I do not know whether the cladding was manufactured in Scotland, China or Germany, so I do not imagine that that would be a big source of potential income.

Who else could the Government raise the levy from? We are talking about spending £200 million a year, but it will cost £3.1 billion to remediate cladding in Scotland. The proposed tax is aimed at only 15 per cent of that. It will go some way towards raising funds, but who else should the required funding be raised from? Others can answer that question as well.

But hold on—you are talking about £141.9 million, not about £5 million or £10 million here or there. I have looked at the figures over a number of years, and the volatility only ever seems to go one way. It is never overestimated; it always seems to be underestimated. That is a huge amount of money. Surely, the Government must know roughly how many people are going to retire next year, yet it underestimates pensions by £141.9 million for the NHS and teachers alone.

I thank you all for your invaluable evidence today. It will be a heavy shift for the minister when he gives evidence to us next week, along with Revenue Scotland.

But many developers set up single-purpose vehicles—in other words, subsidiaries of the main company—so that when things go a bit awry with a development, the main company has no liability. I have experienced that situation with a number of developments in my constituency, so there will be a myriad of examples across Scotland and the rest of the UK. How likely is it that we will be able to pursue some of the companies that are responsible on a polluter-pays basis? They could simply rename and restructure the company so that it is not the same company that did the stuff that we are all upset about.

If the council does not put in place a bond, the developer can just scarper and the council will be left facing those costs. That has happened with at least two developments in my constituency, and I know that it has happened in other places. If everyone behaved according to the rules, things would be fine, but that is the issue that the Government faces, which is why it is proposing an up-front levy.