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The Scottish Landfill Tax (Standard Rate and Lower Rate) Order 2025 specifies the standard and lower rates for the Scottish landfill tax, which will apply from 1 April 2025 and are consistent with the rates set out in the Scottish budget for 2025-26, as published on 4 December last year. The order sets out that the standard rate will increase from £103.70 to £126.15 per tonne and that the lower rate, which applies to less polluting, inert materials, will increase from £3.30 to £4.05 per tonne. Members may wish to note that those rates match the United Kingdom landfill tax rates for the 2025-26 financial year, as confirmed in the October 2024 UK budget.

The Scottish Government has continued acting to avoid any potential for what is referred to as “waste tourism” emerging as a result of material differences between tax rates north and south of the border. The increased rates are intended to provide appropriate financial incentives to support the delivery of the Scottish Government’s circular economy, climate and sustainable resource goals.

I am happy to answer any questions.

I take your point. It is my understanding that the Welsh Government has done that by increasing the lower tax rate to £6.30.

The principle has always been that we do not want to get into an environment where we would be concerned about waste tourism—if you want to call it that. The whole intention is to drive behavioural change through the tax and other policy measures. The trends are clearly moving in a downward direction for both inert and non-inert waste. That is the primary policy intention.

However, there is scope for us to look at what differential rates could do. We need to assess how much additional income that would raise. In the context of the revenue that is being raised reducing significantly anyway as a consequence of the behavioural change that the tax is driving, I am not sure that any increase would make a significant difference.

I will try to get my head around that.

A number of things are happening there. The invest to save fund is one lever, the orders are another and we have other levers on-going. We have talked about the estates programme, the procurement frameworks, digitisation and the automation programme that has already saved a significant amount of money, and those programmes continue. The invest to save fund is targeted specifically at the harder-to-crack challenges, such as the cross-portfolio co-operation that is required, and there are improvements that might take a period of time to generate savings.

To directly answer your question on the invest to save fund, that process has opened. We have already received the first trawl back of those submissions. Officials are looking at those now, and I will see them in the next week or two. Then, before the end of this month, we will identify the projects that we are taking forward with regard to investment of that £30 million.

Those projects will identify how much investment they want, what savings they will deliver as a consequence and in what timescale. As we select those projects and aggregate them, we will be able to answer the question directly and monitor how they are delivered.

To flip that, one of the big criticisms that we rightly get from the third sector and many other organisations is that we do not have multiyear funding, and that affects zero-based budgeting. We go back every year with a blank piece of paper and decide who is going to get the money. Rolling that uncertainty out more widely across the public sector could cause more challenges than it solves problems, so we need to be careful about what we mean by zero-based budgeting.

That said, this is about taking a step back to consider the purpose and deliverables of a group of public bodies in a particular part of the landscape and whether the current configuration is the most effective one or whether we should do things differently. At that point, you would start with a blank piece of paper when considering the minimum number of bodies that would be needed to deliver what you wanted and whether it would be cost effective to make a transformation.

It would be a multiyear approach, because, by its nature, it would take a longer period. You would not do that wholesale; you would look for the low-hanging fruit. To be honest, we have done that in relation to the police and colleges, and we have cited other, minor examples in which the functions of bodies have been brought together. We will continue to look for ways to do that.

You would need to have an evidential base for doing something differently. I suppose that we are working in three dimensions. We are first looking at—as the convener said—how much money an increase would raise. I am looking at the data that is in front of me. Officials will correct me if I am wrong, but there seems to be about 110,000 tonnes at the lower rate, so a £1 increase would bring in an extra £100,000. That would be welcome, but it would not shift the dial on the budget.

If you start to increase that rate by too much and the differential grows, is there the potential for waste tourism? That is the last thing we want, because it makes everything more difficult.

Then there is the question how the current rates are driving behavioural change. With the numbers coming down year on year, it looks as though the tax is having the intended policy impact of driving such behavioural change. However, I would be happy to look at the evidence and to do some modelling as best we can with the information that we have to see what making some changes in future years might deliver.

Sorry, convener—I just want to correct the record, I have just noticed in my notes that there were about 600,000 tonnes at the lower rate, and 110,000 tonnes of that was soil. There was other material in that figure as well, so it is more significant, although not in the big scheme of things.

Indeed, we shall.