About the Scottish Parliament

The aim of this paper is to provide guidance to parliamentary committees on the budget process, which is based on the Budget Review Group’s 2017 review of the budget  process. The Group’s report can be found here: 

Budget Review Group - Final Report

The Group recommended the following framework for the budget scrutiny process—

• Full Year Approach: a broader process in which committees have the flexibility to incorporate budget scrutiny including public engagement into their work prior to the publication of firm and detailed spending proposals
  
  
• Continuous cycle: scrutiny should be continuous with an emphasis on developing an understanding of the impact of budgetary decisions over a number of years including budgetary trends

• Output / outcome focused: scrutiny should also be evaluative with an emphasis on what budgets have achieved and aim to achieve over the long term, including scrutiny of equalities outcomes

• Fiscal Responsibility: scrutiny should have a long-term outlook and focus more on prioritisation, addressing fiscal constraints and the impact of increasing demand for public services; and
  Interdependent: scrutiny should focus more on the interdependent nature of many of the policies which the budget is seeking to deliver.

The budget process should have the following four core objectives to—

• have a greater influence on the formulation of the Scottish Government’s budget proposals
• improve transparency and raise public understanding and awareness of the budget
• respond effectively to new fiscal and wider policy challenges
• lead to better outputs and outcomes as measured against benchmarks and stated objectives.

Parliamentary committees should seek to influence the Budget when priorities are being set through constructive dialogue with Ministers, public bodies and other stakeholders. This dialogue should continue throughout the year using an outcomes-based approach.

The components of the Group’s recommended revised budget process is attached at Annexe A, the structure for the budget process is illustrated in Chart 1 below and an infographic on the budget process is attached at Annexe B to this guidance.