���˿���

It is important that we do not compare apples with oranges. That was an important point.

I thank our witnesses very much. You have given us lots of food for thought for the second panel and beyond. We will have a break now.

To stop them moving elsewhere?

There was a bit of a backlash in my area when it was suggested that parking be priced, and the council changed its policy on it.

One of the things that came out of the previous session was road pricing. How do you do that without impacting adversely on rural communities? Would you have road pricing only in urban areas or on motorways, for example? How would you get round that? Many rural communities in Scotland are fragile, and people in them do not really have any alternative to cars. You can talk about public transport all you like, but it will not make much odds to some people whether you increase the bus service from twice to three or four times a day. The car will remain essential for a number of people in our communities.

It is helpful to an extent, because it helps us to focus. A number of people, including the economists who were here before, have talked about three-year or five-year funding. The Scottish Government is not funded beyond year to year, but there is still the question whether we should plan. I was on the Social Justice Committee during the 1999 to 2003 parliamentary session. We produced a detailed report on why we should do exactly what you have suggested and, 20-odd years later, we are still taking about it. It is a fundamental point, although you have not put pounds, shillings and pence on it.

Ruth, you have some statistical analysis in your report and you have produced some wonderful graphs. Talk us through, in a few short minutes, exactly what additional resources we should provide, Given all the caveats about wealth tax—that it cannot be implemented for the next financial year and so on, according to the economists—what can we do in the next year in order to deliver the agenda that you, the IPPR and others would like?

The last person to comment will be Adam Stachura. Each of our guests will then have one minute to wind up and to mention anything that has not been covered so far.

Judith, you have a minute or so to wind up.

There are a couple of points there. First, the suggestion not to lower the bus pass age from 65 to 60 came not from me but from Callum Chomczuk, who was then at Age Scotland, during the 2011 to 2016 parliamentary session. He said that the money saved should be spent on adaptations for older people. I thought that what Age Scotland had to say at that time was very brave. So many people come here—I am not mentioning any names or looking at anyone specifically—and say that we should spend more money on this, but they do not say how we can save money on that. We as a committee and the Scottish Government have to look at that. John Swinney then said that he was not going to reduce the bus pass age from 65 to 60 but would increase the disabled adaptations budget by 25 per cent. So, there was a big win there for Age Scotland.

You touched on people having to sell their homes, not just because of the wealth tax but to go into a residential care home. That affected my mother and many other people. I was speaking to a leading economist, who has a good relationship with this committee, and he said that two of his aunties said, “You know what? Rather than go into a care home and see the house getting sold, we will just go on a world cruise for the next couple of years and spend the money that way.” That was not a flippant remark; that is what they did. There are some people who, of course, are not able to save up and buy a house, and they do not have an asset to sell. People who feel that they have an asset that they might want to pass on, at least in part, to their children are unable to do so. There is a real issue about the fairness of that.

One of the things that people talk about is fairness. I do not know whether anyone wants to define it for me. Fairness for one person is, perhaps, fairness for another. Anyway, I am starting to wander off as well. The next person to comment will be Judith Turbyne, to be followed by Michael Kellet.

It is a chicken-and-egg situation, is it not? If the economy does not grow and we are not able to attract inward investment because people feel that they will be taxed disproportionately highly, we will not have the money to provide those services. Scotland could become more of a backwater, with more young people leaving and the population stagnating and declining. We had the lowest population growth in the entire world in the 20th century. For example, two million people emigrated in the half century after world war one.

There are real issues to address in the whole package. It is about trying to get the optimum right, not the maximum or the minimum, so that we can achieve what most of us want to achieve.

Does that answer your question, Michael?

I was going to ask you about capital expenditure. I do not like to interrupt you in free flow, but I also asked about behavioural change. For example, what would the impact on people be if the Scottish Government decided that, because, politically, it would be very difficult to cut spending or whatever, it would have to hit the 1 or 2 per cent of the highest taxpayers? You talked about people who are just over the threshold of the higher marginal rate. What impact would it have on them?