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I am inclined to agree, but the Finance Committee has tasked us to consider the issues, so we have a duty to do so. One question is whether the organisations that fall within our remit have any scope for backroom savings and savings from avoiding duplication, but I am not sure whether we can do a huge amount.
Does anyone else have comments? From which organisations do members wish to take evidence? I guess that we will hear from the usual suspects—the enterprise agencies and VisitScotland.
That is important in relation to issues such as spending on renewables.
Perhaps we should hear directly from the co-operative development agency and let it tell us what it thinks is happening.
Perhaps SDI is an appropriate organisation to hear from.
We include it with the enterprise agencies.
Sure.
Knowing who to talk to about the enterprise agencies and VisitScotland is fairly straightforward, but the other slice of the budget that the committee has examined is energy spending. That is largely a reserved issue, but the Scottish Government has an energy budget. From whom would we take evidence about that? That budget is separate from the SE budget. We might think about whom to invite to give evidence on that.
One issue that I raised—as did many of us; it was not just me—during the banking inquiry was mutuals and co-operatives. I would like to hear a bit from Scottish Enterprise about what is being spent on the co-operative development agency, which falls within Scottish Enterprise’s budget. That is topical and I would like to hear what is being done, because we have not heard anything—I do not have a feeling for how the agency is working.
Do members have other suggestions? What has been said is probably sufficient to allow us to fulfil the requirements.
Item 3 is budget scrutiny, on which we have a paper about what is requested. I ask for members’ comments.
We know that the budget will be tight. The difficulty is whether we can see parts of our portfolio that should be further constrained or organisations whose spending in pursuit of their ends we want to investigate. It is hard to know what can be done in two oral evidence sessions to help the Finance Committee’s overall scrutiny of the budget.
Part of the difficulty is that the agencies that are the principal recipients of funding in our brief have already taken a severe kicking in the past couple of years. That makes it difficult to decide what our focus might be. In the context of the wider investigation by the Finance Committee—given the remit that it has set—we should certainly conduct our investigations in so far as we can, but providing a focus on reduced spending will be difficult.
Do we wish to ask for written evidence, too? We can make a general request to anyone who wishes to submit written evidence.