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We recommence with item 4, under which we will take evidence from three experts on borrowing powers. I welcome Professor David Bell, professor of economics at the University of Stirling, Don Peebles, head of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy in Scotland, and Philip Milburn, investment manager at Kames Capital, representing the Investment Association.
We have timed this session to last until about half past 10. To get through things in a structured way, I think that we should look at three aspects: the principles that will underpin the framework to enable borrowing by a subnational Government and any specific challenges around that; further powers on revenue borrowing and capital borrowing and what the appropriate mix would be; and the overall fiscal framework and the institutional bits that will underpin it all. If we concentrate on those three areas, we can probably get through what we need to cover.
Members may direct some questions to an individual witness, but most questions will be addressed to everyone on the panel. I am grateful to the witnesses for coming along today to give us evidence that will help us in coming to our conclusions.
I begin with a general question. The UK command paper containing the draft clauses is relatively silent on the borrowing powers that are to be devolved, indicating that that is a matter for agreement between the UK and Scottish Governments. Do the witnesses consider that legislation should be required in order to devolve powers in that area? In any case, what principles or structures should underpin the devolution of borrowing powers? That is for all three witnesses; I do not mind who kicks off.
A useful comparator is the introduction of the prudential code for local authorities by the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003. Primary legislation was required to enable the significant change—which it was at the time—that introduced a more flexible framework. Our expectation was that there would almost certainly be some indication or some forward notification of change, but you are right to observe that the clauses are silent on borrowing powers—a point that we made in our written submission.
We are here to talk about borrowing powers, on which there has been much discussion since the publication of the Smith commission report, but there has been nothing firm and fast to indicate that there is certainty that enhanced borrowing powers will be introduced. I see no borrowing powers in the command paper. There are no clauses that indicate anything that even determines a forward requirement for enhanced borrowing powers in any way. That said, if there is an expectation about changes to primary legislation, if that is to come at a future point, the question is what that will actually look like. That is probably what we will go on to debate.
The change in primary legislation for local authorities, which came in all those years ago, removed the largely prescriptive framework, in which local authorities were advised how much they could borrow for capital expenditure, and replaced it with a framework that was significantly more flexible, allowing individual local authorities themselves to determine what was affordable and what was sustainable.
That has been the general debate so far. The expectation was that that kind of framework would be overlaid on Scotland, but we are silent on fact so far, and we are certainly silent on clauses. The useful comparison is with local authorities, for which, as I said in my written evidence, primary legislation was needed.
There is quite a bit of discussion about the prudential code in the command paper. Borrowing powers are coming to Scotland through the Scotland Act 2012 and I guess that there is a real question about that, to which we will perhaps return: will those borrowing powers be sufficient, given the enhanced tax powers? I suspect that they will not be, for a variety of reasons.
In one sense, there might be a bit of a difference from the local authority issue, in that Scotland is relatively large compared with the average local authority in England. There is not necessarily a worry to the same extent that borrowing by local authorities would threaten the UK’s fiscal position overall. Probably, Scotland is still relatively small and that would not be the case. I think that local authority borrowing in England and Wales is around £83 billion at the moment, which, set against overall central Government borrowing of £1.2 trillion, is relatively small beer. It is also important to think about the capital borrowing on the one hand and the resource borrowing on the other; I guess that we will deal with that point.
The command paper contains some discussion, but there is nowhere near enough for us to go on or for us to be able to say how things are going to be. A lot is up for debate and there is a lot of work still to be done before we come up with a set of figures that could be agreed.
I mention in my submission that bailouts will be an issue, and I argue that difficulties between central and subnational Governments are relatively common. I guess that the Treasury will try to avoid difficulties where it might appear that the UK Government would bail out the Scottish Government if it got into difficulty. If the markets believe that that is the case—if there is a belief that there is a backstop—Scotland will be able to borrow at a slightly lower rate. I do not think that I am qualified to say whether that needs primary legislation, but there will be a lot of debate around that issue, I think.
Thank you all for your time this morning. I completely agree with Professor Bell. I see my role here as to say what the markets would want. The markets will always want as much certainty as possible. The stronger the framework and the stronger the legislation, the more the markets will understand and the less they will charge as a risk premium. Basically, strong legislation is what the markets generically—not me specifically—would look for.
09:30
That is probably as good a place as any to start in terms of the institutional framework. I will begin a discussion about that and anyone who wants to come in can let me know.
What advice can the panel give us that will enable us to advise the Treasury or any incoming UK Government what that institutional framework might look like and how it would operate? That will be the thing that will underpin whether we get the credit ratings from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s that we require, and at the level that we require. If you have any advice on that, now is the time to let us know. It is a big question, I know.
I suppose that there is an institutional argument about whether there should be a third party that is holding the ring around this particular question, so that it is not all driven by the Treasury.
The issue will probably arise in relation to Wales and it might well arise in relation to Northern Ireland. For all we know, given yesterday’s developments with regard to Manchester getting control over national health service spending, it might arise in relation to some of the larger local authorities in England.
The whole framework is moving around at the moment and nobody is quite sure where it will settle. It is reasonable to ask whether there should be an external body that looks at borrowing and which has the confidence of the markets and can give some of the certainty that Philip Milburn was talking about.
I apologise in advance for the fact that my question probably raises more questions than answers—I am a typical financial practitioner.
There are quite a few questions that need to be answered. One of the most important is what will service the debt. Will it be the Scottish tax revenue or the Scottish tax revenue plus the remaining transfers from Westminster? Obviously, there will continue to be a mix, because of who collects. The assumption, generally, is that it would be all the tax-raising power that would service the debt.
The next question concerns where the interest payments will rank. Obviously, interest payments rank about equivalent to all other spending. We can take the Californian situation as an example. Admittedly, California was in a fiscal mess, which is why the system was set up this way. There, the interest payments are senior to many things, such as teachers’ wages, pensions and so on. That is politically close to unpalatable in most countries nowadays but, again, it is to do with certainty. All that the markets want is to have interest paid on money that is loaned and to get that money back. There are almost institutional questions around that.
The other thing that I thought was quite interesting, which Don Peebles referred to, is that there is not a lot of explicit language in the command paper. However, all the numbers that we have seen are absolute numbers of potential debt raised, whether it is the £2.2 billion or the £5 billion that Don Peebles has modelled in his entries. I think that an ad valorem limit that uses a percentage of gross domestic product or something would—sorry to use dreadful English—future proof the system so that you would not have to go back and renegotiate legislation every five, 10 or 15 years and get into the same problems that the US does with its debt ceiling. An ad valorem limit would be preferable to an absolute limit.
It is worth putting all this into context. We might have leaped headlong into detail, which might be the fault of us practitioners, as that is what we love to do.
David Bell was right to draw attention to the staggering size of the UK’s outstanding debt, at £1.3 trillion. We started off speaking about local authorities. The outstanding level of debt in Scotland is £15 billion, and around £12 billion of that debt is local authority debt. It is important to keep that sense of scale.
It is also important to remember that, although risk is associated with debt and borrowing, borrowing is not a bad thing. It can be quite important for Government to implement borrowing policies on a short to medium-term basis, although there is a long-term consequence associated with that.
In managing that risk, it is right that there is a formal framework that will be a combination of primary legislation, regulation and professional practice, which we can see in other parts of the public sector. In operating all that, the point is to enable local or national government to generate the money necessary to implement policies. It is equally important to note that borrowing in itself will not give anybody any more money—not one penny more—because all we are actually doing is rescheduling tax receipts, so it is a timing issue. That means that the key concern is intergenerational impact—that is, the extent to which one generation benefits by expecting later generations to foot the bill. However, that should be seen in context.
On why the Treasury is very interested in the issue, my understanding is that for international agreements around debt, all public sector debt matters to the UK, not just central Government debt. That includes local government debt and it would include Scottish debt. Under the Maastricht agreement, a limit of 60 per cent of GDP is set for public sector debt, which would include the kind of debt that we are talking about.
Philip Milburn’s point about the pecking order of interest charges is important. We are already spending close to £1 billion out of departmental expenditure limits on private finance initiative repayments. We have an interesting situation whereby around £2.6 billion of welfare spending might come to Scotland and we could make a case for some of that to go into DEL, but even welfare spending can come up against the question of where it would lie in the pecking order if there was an issue around interest charges and they had to be the first commitment that was met. Work needs to be done on the interaction between the different parts of the Scottish budget, because the introduction of welfare payments changes the landscape massively. How Scotland deals with that is extremely important.
I want to go back to a small point that was made earlier, so that I can understand it. Philip Milburn suggested that Scottish borrowing should be serviced exclusively from Scottish tax revenue rather than from global income, including the block grant. Is that the general view? Is that a strict rule that we ought to apply?
Sorry—I may have misrepresented the situation. The markets would need clarity about whether borrowing was serviced by purely Scottish taxes, the mix of which is changing, or taxes that include money raised in Scotland that goes to Westminster and comes back again. My assumption, which I think is reasonably safe, is that the debt will be raised on the whole amount of tax raised, rather than a split part of it, because by definition the larger the pool of tax-raising powers that you have a claim over, the less risky the debt is.
There is a definition aspect around how independent you want the debt to seem. On David Bell’s point about whether the debt will be fully consolidated into the UK, if the answer is yes, then you might as well go for cheaper debt that is reliant on the whole tax base. However, if it is going to be non-consolidated or potentially non-consolidated debt, then you would go for the Scottish tax only.
Given what I do for a living, I am not legally allowed to give investment advice, so my personal opinion is: go cheap.
We are not in private session, so—[Laughter.]
You do not see the size of Scottish tax revenue limiting Scotland’s ability to use its borrowing powers.
Correct.
Other than in the most practical sense, which is that we can borrow only what we can afford.
Yes.
If I can jump in, income tax will generate about £11 billion a year and half of VAT receipts will add another £5 billion or so. We are talking about the Scotland Act 2012 potentially giving us £2.2 billion to spend on infrastructure. The servicing costs on that would go nowhere near the revenue that would be raised from income tax and VAT together, so I do not think that, in the first instance, that would be much of an issue.
Alex Johnstone is right. The key word is affordability. The likelihood is that a considerable raising of risk across the basket of all taxes would be expected. The consideration for policy implementation would be what is affordable and whether that is sustainable over generations.
I am looking for clarification on an issue that was mentioned at the start of the discussion. It was quite clear from the Smith report that, with more borrowing powers, there would need to be a prudential borrowing regime. There was a lot of discussion around that matter on the commission and how that would be a sensible way forward. There was also a recognition that local authorities have more borrowing powers than the Scottish Government.
Paragraph 1.2 of the executive summary in the submission from Don Peebles says that there is a potential omission in that the enduring settlement document does not include the further borrowing powers that were called for in the Smith report. The “Borrowing for capital spending” section of the enduring settlement document recognises what the Smith commission agreement requested in that regard, but it then says:
“The 2012 Act already provides the Scottish Parliament with specific powers for capital borrowing, as set out above.”
I find that quite confusing. It is clear that we do not have a prudential borrowing regime—that is what was requested—but the document says that we have that power. What are your views on that?
That is exactly right. As I said in my opening comments, the discussion and the recommendation from the Smith commission was for the introduction of a prudential borrowing framework. The expectation was that that would translate through to the clauses, but it is not there. The command paper discusses the issue as though there will be a prudential framework, but the trigger point, which would be a proposal for primary legislation, is not there. Therefore, we can talk about a framework, but we do not have one and we do not have the basis to enable one to be introduced.
Scotland’s statutory borrowing power is capped at £2.2 billion. It is perhaps worth comparing that with the experience of local authorities a number of years ago, when central Government in effect prescribed a cap. The cap was removed and the introduction of a more flexible framework enabled public bodies—local authorities—to have regard to affordability, sustainability and prudence and to borrow at a level that was more akin to local need rather than central prescription. You can see how that similarity was expected to be overlaid here.
I reiterate that, as much as we are talking about borrowing powers, we do not have the infrastructure set out to enable us to have a meaningful discussion about borrowing powers. I see no proposal for borrowing powers.
Therefore, we are no further forward.
Statutorily, we must adhere to the £2.2 billion cap, plus the extra 10 per cent.
The command paper makes an interesting reference to the prudential borrowing framework not being
“aimed at increasing the amount of capital expenditure”.
That is an interesting indication. That may well be the case, but the aim was to introduce flexibility and it is that flexibility that Scotland as a country would be looking for.
We would be able to administer rather than simply have powers to change.
Yes, because the power to change is restricted—as it stands, the cap is £2.2 billion.
Thank you.
I have two supplementary questions on related aspects. I would like to understand better the experience of the prudential framework, which is a code to which statute requires local authorities to have regard, which can have a weaker meaning in Scots practice than it does in England, as I understand it. How far has it been successful in delivering what was intended?
Philip Milburn said that the market will look for the strongest possible legislation and framework. From a market perspective, is there a significant difference between the borrowing provision in the 2012 act and the prudential framework?
09:45
I will talk about the practical operation. There was a fairly seamless move from what those of us who are familiar with local authorities would call the section 94 regime into the prudential code. Under section 94, central Government specified to each local authority how much it would be allowed to borrow; local authorities were prescribed a level for capital expenditure, which was a proxy for borrowing and they would borrow up to and including that level. That changed with the introduction of the prudential framework on 1 April 2004 and we moved from central prescription to local flexibility.
Local flexibility was placed firmly on the shoulders of not only the chief financial officers, but the local politicians. Rather than being told specifically what they could afford to spend on capital, the responsibility was theirs, and it had regard to strategic planning and local needs. It was seen as a framework that was not only more flexible, but in keeping with a more strategic approach to how local services should be delivered.
The control mechanism was twofold: the regulations underlying the primary legislation and the professional code of practice. The code of practice—a prescribed code for professionals within local authorities—required the chief financial officer to report regularly to elected members. That placed responsibility, for the first time, on elected members to be aware of, have regard to and approve the capital plans going forward.
I am not aware of any qualification to the financial accounts of a local authority in the 11 years since the prudential framework was introduced. Audit Scotland is in the process of finalising a report, which will probably come out next month, about borrowing and treasury management in local authorities. From the information that I have—not only from Scotland but throughout the UK, where the prudential code is in operation—my feeling is that it is successful and has operated as expected in allowing local flexibility and freedom to be utilised fully by local authorities.
Without oversimplifying, would it be fair to describe the 2012 act provision as parallel to the section 94 provision?
Yes, that is a fair comparison.
That may be true, but not all local authorities are borrowing at triple A—it is a little more expensive than for central Government. It is not triple A any more, although it is nearly triple A.
Do you have anything to say, Philip?
No, I have nothing to add.
I wanted Philip Milburn’s view from a market perspective on whether there is a difference between a prudential borrowing regime and one that is capped and directed from the centre.
It would be nuanced enough that it would be considered, but it would be way down the list of priorities. I imagine that most people would gloss over that in comparison with other issues.
Right.
In an attempt to simplify, because much of this stuff is pretty difficult for me, I will go back to a recurring theme that I have raised when we have dealt with each of the issues that have come out of the Smith commission. Reading the papers and the evidence, are we at the stage where we need to get the institution and framework in place—those understandings—and take into account the UK and European influence, before we get to any of the other issues about the level of borrowing?
If we get in place the framework that deals with risk, the level of borrowing and the security of the markets and the financial institutions, will that give us the potential to address how we service the debt, how we issue bonds, for goodness’ sake, and all that? Is it chicken and egg here? Do we need to settle those issues?
Professor Bell, you expressed little interest in institutional frameworks in your submission, but is having such a framework not the foundation from which everything else will flow?
The simple argument is that if that framework is not in place, the markets will take it out on you. If there is uncertainty associated with issues such as how the block grant adjustment will work, which is hugely important for Scotland, how the welfare moneys will be transferred and whether any short-run adjustments will be made to grants for political reasons, as may be going on in Northern Ireland at the moment, everyone will pay a little bit more for the debt than they need to. It seems to me that that is what will happen until the markets see a clear framework.
It is necessary to go beyond the prudential regime. We are now talking about the macroeconomics of Scotland and the UK as a whole, because the borrowing positions that are taken by local authorities do not matter hugely, but the position of the country as a whole matters for borrowing purposes and for all kinds of things. We are in the present austerity regime largely because our borrowing got out of control towards the end of the last decade.
That is true, but it is worth bearing in mind that the national borrowing limit stands at £2.2 billion, whereas the outstanding debt for local government is £15 billion, in effect. Therefore, it is possible to come to the conclusion that, even now, local authorities have considerably greater powers than the national Government.
It is worth reiterating—I could not agree more with Duncan McNeil’s point—that we have to have the framework in order to know what we are talking about. Otherwise, the three of us will revert to type and start talking about the concerns, the risks and the problems associated with having borrowing powers. We must come back to why it is a good thing. The point of borrowing powers is to enable you as politicians to have available the full suite of fiscal powers that you need to deliver positive policies to benefit the people of Scotland. That is what the issue is about. It should not be a technical issue. We can handle that, but you must have the tools to enable you to do your job and to make your decisions.
Don Peebles has got to the heart of the matter. My assumption is that the framework will be put in place at some stage if there is the political desire and will to do so. That might be a bold assumption. Once that framework has been put in place, the question will be whether there is a desire to use it—there is not much point in putting it in place if there is no desire to use it—and what the interest cost and the intergenerational cost that Don Peebles talked about will be.
I mentioned the European agreements that we are involved in and the relationship that needs to exist at UK level if we are to secure some of that money. Is there an issue with the whole of Scotland’s debt that we need to have some discussion with local authorities about? Do we need to make sure that central Government will not use up all the borrowing, as a consequence of which there will be less borrowing for local authorities?
My understanding of the way in which the debate has gone is that the intention of the flexibilities that have been discussed is to enhance rather than to limit any existing powers. I would not anticipate—
But Professor Bell says that we can double the present cap, if we get the frameworks right, so I would describe the cap as low. That needs to grow.
If you are thinking about all of Scotland’s debt, one issue is what proportion of the PFI debt should be brought on to the balance sheet. That has been a very contentious issue for the UK as a whole over the years. As I have said, around £1 billion is going out each year just to service that debt.
There is a good argument for having a total view of the indebtedness of all the public bodies in Scotland because there is the question of what happens if something goes wrong. Who will bear the cost of that? Suppose that one of our local authorities failed to abide by the prudential regime and got into trouble. Who would bear the cost of that? Would the Scottish Government do so? One might expect that that would be the case, but who knows? At least I do not know the answer to that question. Assuming that things will always work out is quite a strong assumption over time.
Something is not barking here. The Scotland Act 2012 talks about a limit of £2 billion. The Scotland Bill Committee sensibly came to a conclusion that the figure should be £5 billion, I think. Do the three of you support the idea that the figure should be closer to £5 billion? Why should that be? I would like to get that on the record.
If there is a continuation of the capital grant element as part of the spending review, the DEL will be allocated for the next two or three years ahead. There is normally a resource component and a capital component, and transfers can be made from resource into capital but not in the opposite direction. Therefore, it seems to me that the borrowing power would be conditional on how much money is received from that source through the block grant. Arguably, too little has been spent on infrastructure in recent years. There is a multiplier argument that money that is spent on infrastructure has a more long-run beneficial effect on growth. Unfortunately, I do not think that I can give the committee an answer on the amount until I know how much capital is coming through DEL.
Don Peebles and Philip Milburn mentioned the intergenerational burden. We have to be very confident that we are in a position to make decisions so that our grandchildren will say, “That was the right decision to make. We’ve got ourselves into this much debt, but we have assets, such as the new Forth road bridge, that offset that and those are things that the last generation did for us.”
The answer to the question, in effect, is what you as politicians will want to do. What are your priorities? How do you want to deliver them? If an investment in infrastructure is a priority, that might necessitate an increase from somewhere around £2.2 billion to a figure that is closer to £5 billion.
Ultimately, it will be about what is affordable and sustainable. Talking about fixed numbers almost takes us into the realm of credit card limits, whereas we are looking at a system in which there is flexibility for the Scottish Government to enable it to take decisions, depending on economic circumstances and the policies that it wants to implement. As I have said, it is about the Scottish Government having to hand a suite of fiscal tools to enable it to take all the necessary decisions.
I know that that is perhaps an unsatisfactory answer in that I am not giving a specific figure.
It is not unsatisfactory.
However, we are looking at flexibility. Whether the figure is £2.2 billion, £5 billion or greater than that is irrelevant compared with what politicians will want to do on a national basis.
10:00
I alluded to this earlier in talking about an ad valorem limit. I would try to avoid a hard limit, be it £2.2 billion or £5 billion. I would veer towards a form of percentage of Scottish GDP—obviously, it would need to be negotiated—so that a countercyclical measure can be put in place. If you assume there is a downturn in recession and GDP shrinks by 2 to 3 per cent, that starts to be a sensible area.
My answer to the second question is exactly what Don Peebles said. The issue is the serviceability of the extra debt, or the service cost of it, and the effect that that has on the following years as well. That said, I would always look at using a percentage in order to ensure that the limit that is set could last for the next 10, 20 or 30 years, assuming—as everyone does—that the Scottish economy should grow nicely over that period.
That seems to be a progressive and sensible way to go about it. Of course, the Treasury might not see it that way, because it wants to put limits on it; that is why it wants to have the discussion.
The question that I was going to ask has been partly answered in the past couple of minutes, but there is another element to it. The words “certainty” and “uncertainty” have been used. It could be argued that the £2.2 billion limit would provide an element of certainty about what the Government could do, whereas the use of a percentage of Scottish GDP, which Mr Milburn suggests, would present an element of uncertainty about what the Government could borrow if there was an economic downturn.
I completely agree—you are right. The absolute cap of £2.2 billion provides certainty. Please do not take this comment as flippant in any way but, in the context of the international market, £2.2 billion is such a small amount of money that it would be implicitly assumed that, if the Scottish Government got into borrowing difficulties, there would be some form of bailout from the UK Government. That would be implicitly but not explicitly assumed by the markets.
Another element is that economies are cyclical. In a hypothetical situation, if the £2.2 billion limit had been in place over the past seven years, the Scottish Government would have had certainty and the flexibility to invest. However, if we had had a percentage of GDP limit, the Government’s opportunity to stimulate the economy, particularly through infrastructure investment, would have decreased when the economy went down. Am I correct in that?
I would like to go first on that question. This is not any comment on the Scottish Government whatsoever; Governments around the world often talk about balanced budgets and have their debt-to-GDP and fiscal deficit ratios, such as the Maastricht 3 per cent fiscal deficit and 60 per cent debt-to-GDP limits. What Governments around the world always forget to do is pay back the debt in the good times, so they find themselves banging up against the limits exactly when they should be spending.
As you say, Governments might want to spend when they cannot because of a limit, but the idea is that they should show prudence and pay back the debt in the good times. That is the hardest bit. It is good fun spending money, and building infrastructure is a popular thing to do. Paying money back is the hard bit. I would argue that the GDP limits are sensible, provided that there is a framework or agreement to make sure that budgets are balanced through the cycle, so that Governments have the flexibility to use the firepower in the downturn.
People might want the limit to be a share not of current GDP but of cyclically adjusted GDP. In that way, the cyclical effects are taken out. Of course, that opens up a bunch of arguments that have been played through in the past decade on what exactly the cyclically adjusted level of GDP is, which is certainly an issue.
We have in the past few minutes glossed over the borrowing powers under the Scotland Act 2012. The £2.2 billion is for infrastructure; the act does not say that it is for combating the effects of recession. There is provision for resource spending, which is really about getting tax revenue forecasts wrong. My paper says what would be the worst-case scenario for getting it wrong. That would create an immediate problem, as it did in the UK in 2009-10, when income tax revenues went way below what had been forecast. There is a piggy bank to deal with that issue as well as the longer-term capital infrastructure issue. The enduring settlement document tries to make that distinction fairly clear.
I will pick up on David Bell’s point about the assumption that the Scottish Government or the UK Government would bail out a local authority that borrowed irresponsibly. Does that comment imply that some sort of statutory back-up is needed? Would the same point apply to the UK Government bailing out a Scottish Government that got it wrong financially and found itself in such a situation?
The view could be taken that the Scottish Government can borrow as much as it likes as long as it is absolutely clear that the UK Government will not bail it out if it gets into difficulties. Countries find it incredibly difficult to stick with a no-bailout clause. We have seen that in play this week with Greece. It thought that there was a no-bailout clause and the Germans were very strong on the issue, but ultimately, another compromise was found. That is an extraordinarily difficult thing to deal with.
I presume that that is because, as long as Scotland is part of the UK and part of the UK’s public sector borrowing profile, it is in the UK’s interests to bail it out.
There is the too-big-to-fail argument, but it does not matter whether Scotland is too big; it is not in the UK’s interests for Scotland to get into fiscal difficulties. That is absolutely clear and it might affect the market thinking about debt.
On the point about local authorities and the possibilities that could transpire, under the 2003 act there is a reserved power for the Scottish Government that means that it can revert to central control, in effect. The primary legislation that is coming along might have a similar protective clause.
I was going to go to Mark McDonald but, to keep a political balance, I will call Alison Johnstone first.
I will pick up on Lewis Macdonald’s question. David Bell’s paper suggests that bailouts might be more likely when the central and subnational Governments are of the same political persuasion. Is there international evidence to back that?
I am happy to share the paper from which I drew that evidence. There seems to be no regularity in the fiscal arrangements that exist between national Governments and subnational Governments. The researchers who looked into that did not find that a particular form of federal system resulted in the need for bailouts. However, they found that, when the subnational Government and the central Government shared the same political allegiance, a bailout was more likely. The argument was not that the subnational Government was too big to fail; it was about whether it was formed by the same party.
But bailouts occur when the Governments do not share the same political beliefs.
They do. I was quite surprised by the countries that I listed. Sweden, Germany and Australia were three of them, and we assume that those countries are fiscally responsible.
I would appreciate seeing the paper.
I return to Linda Fabiani’s line of questioning. The issue is the lack of a clause, if you like. Professor Bell said that borrowing powers are an essential part of any fiscal framework and Don Peebles suggested that
“The draft clauses ... do not however provide for an extension to the existing borrowing powers”.
Are you surprised? Has there just been an oversight? Is it a surprising oversight?
I assume that that is an omission or that a key consideration of the command paper’s draftsperson is that they are looking for some other arrangement. The language of a prudential framework is used in the command paper, and readers could be forgiven for thinking that a prudential framework of enhanced borrowing powers will come along, but there is no substance to that—nothing points us in that direction. In the absence of anything else, I assume that that is an omission.
Is the intention unclear?
I thought that the Smith commission was clear. The command paper picked that up, but it does not have the obvious corollary of a clear clause setting out what would happen, which I thought it would have, given the direction of everything else.
I agree with Don Peebles, but I wonder whether the issue was just a victim of the hurried drafting and the fact that agreement could not be reached in the time available.
Does Mr Milburn have a view?
I will stick with what the experts say, if that is okay.
That is fine.
My question follows on nicely from Alison Johnstone’s. At the moment, a capital grant is provided to the Scottish Government. Additional borrowing powers had been expected to supplement that, but it has been suggested that those powers might be a replacement, which would restrict flexibility over capital investment. How are things likely to go regarding that capital grant?
The wording of the enduring settlement document was not entirely clear on that point. Don Peebles explained what happens with local authorities. The big question is what would happen to the block grant if there was a change in the status of its capital DEL element. Would the block grant stay the same and would Scotland get to decide on the allocation issue?
The allocation between resource and capital is always set up by the Treasury in the spending review. Each department gets a resource allocation and a capital allocation and it cannot reduce the capital allocation. I am afraid that that is another uncertainty: we are not absolutely clear about not only whether Scotland might go to a prudential regime approach but what that might mean for the size of the DEL grant. To take away the £2.3 billion or so would be pretty drastic.
So in your consideration, that £2.3 billion would become part of a lump-sum resource allocation, and it would be open to a future Scottish Government to make an allocation from resource to capital. The Scottish Government can make resource-to-capital allocations at present, but a capital DEL element is identified. Will that identification go, which would leave it to the Scottish Government to decide its own capital allocation from within a resource budget, or are you suggesting something different?
I am just speculating, but what you suggest is a possible outcome. Depending on what happens with the political outcomes in May and the spending review that follows, further cuts might be made and the Treasury might decide to allow departments to determine DEL and resource limits, but that is just speculation on my part.
10:15
Sure—I understand that.
I would be grateful for input from Mr Peebles and Mr Milburn on the point; in regard to future planning, it concerns me that there appears to be a lack of clarity about it. From this committee’s perspective, we need to determine whether what comes to Scotland matches up to what was agreed by the Smith commission and we need to determine its appropriateness for use. Do you agree that, as things stand, further clarity is needed on what happens to the capital grant allocation?
Against the background of the whole consideration of borrowing and capital expenditure, there has to be clarity. In effect, you have to be clear about why you want it. I come back to the point that it is a positive thing. We do not necessarily want to get caught up in the technicalities of terminology in the HM Treasury letter—there is not a lot that we can do about that. You need to ask what you are actually looking for. You are looking for the fiscal tools to enable you to deliver effective government.
Depending on the state of the economy and on the policies of the day, it may well be that in certain years the Government borrows more than it has previously or shifts money from one resource to another. That is the kind of freedom that you are looking for. Your choices will be wholly dependent on what, as politicians, you decide that you want to do, rather than on another department deciding what you should be doing.
I come back to the comparison with the move from section 94 of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 to the prudential borrowing framework arrangement in local authorities. The whole point of that change was that it clearly shifted central prescription from Government to the local arrangement in Scottish local authorities. A similar shift could be undertaken from central Government to the Scottish Government.
I reiterate that currently the big unknown is what the size of the block grant will be over the next couple of years. A lot of the taxing ability is already known; the big unknown is what the compensatory decrease in the block grant will be. That is the bit that needs nailing down first—forgive the terminology—before you can know whether you need or want to borrow.
I echo the earlier comments that, even once you have your steady state and know roughly how much you have to spend each year, having flexibility around it is a necessary power so that you have local tools at the Scottish level to make countercyclical or infrastructure investments.
My personal view is that as well as having the on-going amount—the amount that you know you have to spend year on year—having extra power over capital allocation, in order to be able to implement big projects if one so desires, is a necessary tool to provide the additional flexibility that is desired.
If it were to go the other way from what Professor Bell has suggested might happen—if that £2.3 billion were to be removed and essentially had to be replaced through borrowing—the concern would be that we would be borrowing £2.3 billion just to stand still before we could then exercise further borrowing powers.
It is actually worse than that, in that you would be borrowing to stand still and then the interest on that borrowing would start to compound. It is that bad.
There are a couple of quick supplementaries on this issue, and then I want to get into a couple of other areas before the end of the session.
My supplementary might be a confusing one, but something struck me when Mark McDonald was talking. If we have only the admin power and not further fiscal power, and if we are relying on flexibility within that admin power, how does that then affect things such as the Treasury clawback rules on end-year flexibilities, which were changed a few years ago? Would we have to set up particular types of purely draw-down borrowing? Would that be taken into account in the annual calculations?
I think that David Bell mentioned that in his paper.
Yes, David mentioned the changes to end-year flexibility in his paper.
Those changes took place because the Scottish Government successfully argued that Scotland was building up a considerable underspend in its department expenditure limit budget. There was a clear case that that should be spent in subsequent years, and it was.
The issue goes back to the need for clarity. As I point out in my submission, on the one hand, there is the possibility of errors in forecasting the taxes that may be generated. If we make the kind of errors that were made in 2009 and commit to spending on that basis, there will be an immediate need to borrow for that reason. On the other hand, there is a spending risk, which I do not think people have really noted in the current debate. We may not spend in a year what the plans say we are going to spend.
There is a forecast risk and there is a spending risk, and a short-term facility is needed to deal with that. That would have to be determined by the framework that we are all talking about, but it does not exist and we are not really sure what it means. One would think that errors of a short-term nature would have to be dealt with in two or three years, whereas the borrowing for capital reasons would be longer-term borrowing and it might go to the markets.
All that I am doing is adding to the uncertainty—sorry about that. That reveals further the need for a clear framework, which we have all been talking about, so that all the issues can be discussed together. I suspect that that has to be done at UK level, because it is not only Scotland that is in this game. It might well involve Wales, if it gets income tax power, and Northern Ireland, if it gets corporation tax power.
One important factor that Linda Fabiani identified is the clawback of underspend at the end of the year. In any future regime, it would be prudent not to have that clawback as such, because you will want to be able to hang on to that money for future years. One could almost target an underspend each year, because it is much easier to solve an underspend than an overspend.
The reason why we use terms such as “end-year flexibility” and “clawback” is because Scotland does not have the power to hold reserves as such. The current system is part of HMT’s overall look on an annual basis and is not based on a long-term view. One recommendation that we made to the Smith commission was that part of a significant fiscal suite would be the power to hold reserves. There is reference to a small reserve in the command paper but not to the full powers that we are looking for and that we think are necessary.
We have got into the area that I was going to go into. It is great fun to have capital borrowing powers, because we can spend money on stuff and put it on tick, but good housekeeping requires us to address the revenue issue. As you mentioned, there is no power to hold a reserve. What proportion of Scotland’s borrowing ability will have to be held in reserve in order to ensure that we can overcome any tax volatility year on year?
You are right to refer to volatility. As power over the income base increases, volatility will be more of a consideration and it will have to be factored into any calculations on affordability and long-term sustainability. Looking ahead, the Government will have regard to that and will consider the extent to which the revenue resources are utilised in a single year.
What I think might happen economically is that the Government will set aside some of those revenue resources to build up a reserve from which it can draw down in future. There is no statutory requirement or specific requirement in guidance about the percentage of reserves that should be held. Again, that is down to local determination and consideration of the economic circumstances and other information at the time.
Would it be fair to say that the risk of tax volatility is relatively low in the proposals compared with what it might have been if, for example, oil and gas revenue had been devolved? In that case, the risk of volatility would have been so big that the borrowing powers to cover that year on year would have been disproportionate and it would have been virtually unachievable.
I am afraid that I have no evidence to give on that specific question.
This is not a political point, but on the basis of pure economics the answer to your question is yes. If oil revenue were to be devolved, it would, of course, add to volatility—good volatility in the up years and bad volatility in the down years.
I do not have any rough numbers in front of me—I am sorry about that—but under what is being devolved in the command paper the tax take in Scotland will become more geared to Scottish economic growth than it was before and it will go up from roughly the high single-digits pence in the pound to mid-teens pence in the pound. The issue is the amount of extra spending power Scotland has for every extra 1 per cent that Scotland rather than the UK grows, and including oil in that would have added enormous volatility.
In my submission, I try to work out a worst-case scenario for income tax volatility based on the error that was made in the budget forecast for, I think, 2008-09—or it might have been 2009-10—and what actually happened with income tax revenue. If you translate that across to Scottish income tax take—if, indeed, Scotland gets all of that take—you will find the cost to be in the high £400 millions or that kind of area. I suppose that that is the worst post-war shock to income tax revenues that has been experienced.
I suppose that if investment is made in the right places in the good years, if things are managed properly and if there are sufficient reserves in the system, that kind of volatility can be managed out.
In your submission, Philip, you suggest two different ways of treating expenditure in Scotland: first, a “balance sheet for Scotland”—[Interruption.] I am sorry—I meant Don Peebles’s submission. I could see Philip starting to wonder, “Did I say that in my paper?”
In your submission, Don, you talk about a “balance sheet for Scotland” approach and a “‘whole of Scotland’ accounts” approach. Which is better?
What we are actually interested in is accountability. If we are getting new powers to do different things with expenditure and income, is the old form of accountability going to be appropriate? In some cases, it might be, but if we think about the proposals as a country, the fact is that we do not necessarily report as a country.
We report on statistics as a country, but not on audited accounts, and we heavily favour having a balance sheet for Scotland that would form part of whole-of-Scotland accounts that would allow us to assess the overall performance of the country and its public services. At the moment, we cannot do that without aggregating the audited financial statements of the nearly 200 public bodies that exist. We therefore favour whole-of-Scotland accounts.
I think that, this time, I am right to ask Philip Milburn this question. As Scotland begins to get these powers, the markets’ knowledge and interest will begin to emerge. From where I am sitting, I do not have enough information to know whether the markets are being informed about what Scotland is going to get. Should the Scottish and UK Governments begin to warm up the markets to ensure that we enter into this process in an easier and smoother way?
The short—[Interruption.] Excuse me—I must have lost my voice in shock.
The short answer to your question about the need to keep in touch with the markets is yes. I should emphasise that the amount of debt that can be raised—if it turns out to be just £2.2 billion—is, in international terms, very small compared to the £1.3 trillion of UK debt. However, the market loves certainty, and the more information that you can give it and the more you stay in constant contact with it, the better.
10:30As for the nuances of the question of how, if this goes ahead, the Scottish issuing entity will be able to issue debt, it might be better to take the necessary steps in that respect once all the other bits of the framework are in place. However, a simplified version would be: get together a presentation pack; trot round Edinburgh, London and a few other centres; and show people the balance sheet that Don Peebles has talked about.
You need to give people information that allows them to judge the strength of the institutions, the legal system and so on—all of which, by the way, Scotland will score very well on. The issue is then the strength of the fiscal position. None of that is particularly Scotland-specific—it is just another country or, in this case, another sub-national issuing entity that wants to issue debt to the markets—so the more information, the better.
In a lot of this, we are arguing about an odd half a per cent of cost on the debt here or there, not about the difference between 2 and 10 per cent. This is nothing more than an estimate, but for 10-year debt we would be arguing about the difference between 2.5 and 3 per cent in interest costs if we primed the market with information.
I want to support Don Peebles’s comments about getting accounts for the whole of the public sector in Scotland. There are accounts for the whole of the UK called whole-of-Government accounts, which take into account state and public sector pension liabilities. Actually, I am not absolutely sure whether the state pension is taken into account.
It is not.
In any case, if you are going to take a view on what will be affordable, you might find those accounts quite salutary with regard to forthcoming commitments that people have not quite figured out yet.
Thank you very much for what has been a helpful evidence session. As has been said, all that you have done is raise more questions and concerns, but that is still important.
Can I come in, convener?
I am sorry, Stuart, but we have to end this discussion.
I want to set our witnesses some homework, if that is okay—and, indeed, if you have the time to do it. I realise that I am borrowing on you a bit, to use that terminology. An issue that was raised at the beginning of the discussion and which has been touched on the whole way through is the institutional framework from a budgetary and regulatory perspective: what the new regime will be, who will borrow, regulate and scrutinise and how the markets can be reassured. If you have some time, gentlemen, it would be useful to get written advice on such matters. That would be helpful not only to us but to the Finance Committee at a later date. It might well be asking you the same questions, so you will forgive me if that is the case.
I thank the witnesses very much for their attendance and evidence. That brings our evidence session to an end, and we will move into private session. Before we do so, I should tell members that the committee’s next meeting will be on Thursday 5 March, when we will take evidence from a range of experts on the draft clauses on the Crown Estate.
10:33 Meeting continued in private until 11:21.Previous
Subordinate Legislation