Meeting of the Parliament 24 March 2026 [Draft]
First, I pay tribute to Sarah Boyack, who has just spoken. Her speech contained a long list of the very many initiatives with which she has been associated and that she has pushed as a member of the Parliament. On behalf of the Scottish Conservatives, I wish to pay tribute to her service to our country, as a minister and as a member. I had not had the privilege of watching Sarah Boyack in action close up until I became a member of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. She has an impressive approach to policy, with her grasp of detail and her interest—indeed, her curiosity—in how things can come together to work for the betterment of the people of Scotland. I pay tribute to her.
Likewise, I am grateful to Evelyn Tweed for her service to the people of Stirling, which is her constituency. She and I have a shared passion for the people of the Stirling area. I am grateful for her service as a councillor on Stirling Council before she became a member of the Parliament. I know that she has always striven to do the very best that she can. She was right to pay tribute to her office, because she and her team have been a powerful source of good information during difficult times for the people of Stirling, particularly when we had dreadful weather last year—I think that it was last year; I cannot remember, as everything just meshes into one after a while. Anyway, her office did a fantastic job of communicating the latest information to the people of Stirling, so I pay tribute to her for her public service.
It has been an interesting debate. When it comes to such affairs, it is usual for there to be some liberal rewriting of history. That was not a dig at Willie Rennie, although I noticed that his obsession with bells and whistles has not been cured since his previous stage 3 speech, when he made repeated reference to them.
I join Willie Rennie in paying tribute to the way in which the bill process has been run. The only problem was when the stage 2 committee proceedings were postponed. For some bizarre reason, there had been a miscalculation of how many days or hours we had to wait until we could have a committee meeting. It was all a bit much: on the evening before, we were told that we would not hold the meeting and everything had to be rearranged at very short notice. However, that was the only hiccup in the whole process, and we have all practised maximum self-restraint in not lodging loads and loads of amendments.
Willie Rennie said that he has heard some scary stories about how the revenues from the levy might be used and how that seems to have very little to do with the sector that will have to collect the revenues. I agree with him, which is why, sadly, I disagree with Mark Griffin—I usually quite like to agree with him—over his resistance to putting in the bill some encouragement for exemptions for people attending hospital or other medical appointments who have to stay overnight in an area because it is absolutely necessary. I am disappointed that he could not see the sense in that. I am glad that other speakers, including Willie Rennie, saw that that would have been a good idea. I hope that the minister, in concluding the debate, will do exactly what has been suggested to him and will give strong encouragement to all our local authorities to create an exemption for those who are visiting an area because they have to be there to fulfil a medical appointment.
I am sorry to inject a note of controversy in what has otherwise been a most agreeable debate, but Ariane Burgess was not quite right when she said that some of us had made a mistake in opposing the very existence of a visitor levy. It is in the DNA of the Scottish Conservatives that we will never jump up and down with enthusiasm for new taxes of any description. It is clearly on the label of our party and in what we stand for that we are against that sort of thing; in the spirit of “Father Ted”, we would say, “Down with this sort of thing.” We want to reduce taxes and to have simpler taxes, fewer taxes and more effective taxes, so I do not agree with Ariane Burgess that we were wrong to take that approach.
The Conservatives and other members, including Fergus Ewing, who is sat at the back of the chamber, made the case that the bill that became the 2024 act was flawed. Fergus Ewing was right to encourage ministers to listen. Some of the best examples of good law making that we can possibly see are where the minister who is leading the process is open to listening to what members and, more widely, stakeholders are saying.
I thank the minister, Ivan McKee, who has brought some remedy to what was a flawed piece of legislation. He has brought post-legislative scrutiny to a new level of competence by introducing the Visitor Levy (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill in the way that we all encouraged him to. I congratulate him on that, and I appreciate the fact that Fergus Ewing is right when he says that the minister has a pro-business leaning.
I can see that I am out of time, so will conclude by saying that, although I do not resile from any of the amendments that I lodged, I was grateful that Mr McKee accepted one of them. The ultimate test of the visitor levy will be how it works in practice and I hope that we will be open to further review in future, because I am sure that there will be many opportunities for a positive critique.