Chamber and committees

Good morning, convener and members of the committee. Your visit to Lithuania sounds very interesting, and I will be happy to follow up on some of the issues that arose there, perhaps at a later meeting.

I very much welcome today’s discussions as part of the committee’s pre-budget scrutiny. As a Government, we are committed to increasing transparency in our budget-setting process and ensuring that value for money and fiscal sustainability are achieved in the decisions that we reach.

As discussed in detail at our previous session, the medium-term financial strategy and its accompanying delivery plan reinforce the Government’s commitment to managing the public finances responsibly and delivering a balanced budget each year, alongside strengthening the fiscal position over the medium term. Redirecting resources to the most impactful interventions that support our strategic priorities will be key to our approach, and our public service reform strategy will tackle systemic barriers to reforming public services over the longer term.

I have looked across everything that we do, and we will make the changes required to protect services, driving efficiency in all areas of service delivery, including significant efficiency and reform savings across the public sector while reducing the size of the public sector workforce. That sets the landscape for our work on developing the 2026-27 Scottish budget—I am looking ahead to the new budget. I have followed the committee’s pre-budget scrutiny sessions with stakeholders with interest, and I look forward to exploring the topics and issues that have been raised with members.

The committee is aware that, since we last met, the United Kingdom Government announced its intention to deliver its autumn statement on 26 November. It was disappointing that there was no advance discussion with the Scottish Government on that, given the potential impact on the Scottish budget.

Noting the now unavoidable delay to the Scottish budget and the accompanying fiscal publications, members will be aware of my letter of 19 September and my inclination to propose Thursday 15 January 2026 as the potential publication date of the 2026-27 Scottish budget. I am keen to discuss that further with the committee and to seek your views on potential plans for the budget.

I appreciate that this is difficult for us all, and I have carefully considered the need to allow sufficient time for the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s forecasting and for parliamentary scrutiny, as well as Scottish Government considerations. The integrated nature of the Scottish budget means that it is important to keep the four fiscal publications aligned. I am therefore keen that the Scottish budget, the spending review, the infrastructure investment plan and the infrastructure delivery pipeline continue to proceed as a package and are published at the same time. I appreciate that there may be differing views on that, however, and I am happy to discuss that further.

I take your point. There is something about the transformation of the college estate going forward. If you do not mind, I will draw an example from my patch. Dundee and Angus College has been quite forward in its thinking. It has taken hard decisions about some of the courses that it provides and has tried to align its offering more with the skills that local employers and the workforce require. It also has ambitious plans for its estate. There is something about transformation—what our college estate will look like in future and what it will provide.

There is also a wider question for the skills sector, in which colleges play a key role. In the not-too-distant past, some big reviews have been done on that, which have indicated that we need to ensure that our skills landscape is delivering what young people and not-so-young people require for the workplace. I am not unsympathetic to the point that you are making.

It will cover infrastructure projects over £5 million and programmes over £20 million. There is a lot below that involving small projects. There are the projects that either have their business case or have their business case in process, and then there will be those that are in the phase beyond that. There will be big differences between some of the national infrastructure projects, which will be the big projects, and some of the more local infrastructure projects.

As you are aware, convener, we are constrained by the capital outlook. We have a very disappointing capital outlook from the spending review, so we are very exercised at the moment about how we can expand the capital envelope through other means. You will appreciate that we have a lot of ambition in the capital space and we do not want to be constrained in that ambition, so we are giving a lot of thought to that. We will set that all out when we come to it in January.

I think that the target was about a 0.4 per cent annualised reduction in workforce. I cannot quite get the numbers to hand, but we did have them and I can send you them. Essentially, convener, it is a downward trajectory—

Yes.

It must happen across the board. We need to lead by example, and changes have been made in the director-general territory to ensure that we do not ask others to do things that the top level of the civil service itself is not prepared to do. There has been a reduction in the number there in order to lead by example, which my portfolio very much needs to do.

However, in doing all that, we need to ensure that we are not losing the investment in, say, digital and automation, which needs to be—

I will check with justice colleagues exactly where that has got to, convener, and I will come back to you.

It is a bit easier to do that when you have the whole picture, but that is not to say that there is not something that we can do in that respect. I am happy to look at that. We are always keen to see ideas from elsewhere, and there might be some merit in doing that here.

I know that this will be difficult in the current political climate, but if we were able to establish enough of a consensus about what such a vision would look like, we might be able to have some kind of landing space in which, although we might disagree on certain things, we could agree on the things that we need to move towards. That might bring benefits.

I guess at a very high level it goes back to the key priorities, and the overarching key priority of eradicating child poverty. The question is: do our programmes help achieve that aim? There are various lenses through which we would look at existing spend and priorities to try to ensure consistency. We are also required, by law, to produce another child poverty delivery plan—the third—which will give us a good chance of hitting the child poverty targets by 2030. That is one example of the lens, I guess—

I guess that the overall answer is yes. Every part of the public sector would be looked at in terms of the contribution that it can make.

Without giving away any trade secrets, we have been having a debate about whether the bulk of the overall spend—whether it is in colleges, childcare or health—does enough to eradicate child poverty. We have a tendency sometimes to focus on the new bits of funding. There is a question about the rest of the tens of billions of funding through our various structures. I am quite thoughtful about that. Whether it is colleges or the health service, we need to interrogate whether what they are doing—for example with our childcare programmes—is going as far as it could to lift families out of poverty.