Scotland Bill

For 18 years, during which I was a member of both Fife regional council and Fife council, they were unitary authorities but we did not have a joint police board and we did not elect or appoint members from different authorities to a separate organisation in which the police were funded entirely by a budget decision of a single authority. In effect, they were operating financially as though they were the education service or the social work service. At that point they had the same VAT treatment as the police in Strathclyde or Lothian, which were managed by a joint board. Fife police did not have, in the Minister’s words, a legal call on the resources of the authority. They were funded because the authority thought it was the right thing to do, not because the police had the right to demand the funding from us. Will the Minister explain why the same position does not now apply to the Police Service of Scotland or the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service?