Finance Committee, 07 Mar 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 7, 2000

Official Report 184KB pdf

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Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body Budget

Item 2 is the written agreement with the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body on the budgeting process. Members have copies of my correspondence with the Presiding Officer, and will note that the Presiding Officer said in his letter to me that the SPCB

"concluded that changes can be made that should meet your concerns."

Members also have a redraft of the agreement. The paragraph which we particularly need to examine appears to be number 9. It is more specific than it was in the previous version, and it seems to answer the points that we raised.

Does anyone wish to comment on it?

An almost hands-off sentence was put in paragraph 9, was it not? It says:

"More detailed expenditure plans are properly a matter for the SPCB itself and in any case may not be available in the above timescales."

I am not sure that we have got the message across that we are trying to be helpful. That seemed a particularly defensive statement. I am not sure what comments you have exchanged with the Presiding Officer, convener.

I think that you are looking at the earlier draft, David. It has been amended.

Have I got the documents the wrong way round, convener? I beg your pardon.

The sentence to which you specifically referred has been excised.

If I say, "adopt the same approach as the Scottish Executive", is that equally helpful?

I think that that or a similar phrase was in my letter. I certainly used words to that effect. I will read from my letter to Sir David Steel:

"The Committee is of the view that this approach does not go far enough in that it expects to receive the same level of information from the SPCB at each stage as it does from the Executive."

That is incorporated in the new version of the agreement.

Is the committee agreed that I write to the Presiding Officer, saying that we are happy with the new wording?

Members indicated agreement.

Item 3 is the initial budget proposal for the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. There is a further letter from Sir David Steel on this. I think that, at this stage, we only need to note that the Executive received the SPCB expenditure proposals. Members will note that, in the fourth paragraph of his letter, Sir David wrote:

"The capital expenditure plans for the SPCB are primarily the costs associated with Holyrood."

We are going to discuss that under the next agenda item, so I simply draw that part of the Presiding Officer's letter to members' attention. I do not particularly want to have a debate on that at this stage if we can avoid it.

This cannot be allowed to happen regularly. If the information in this letter is to form a formal part of the budget process, it needs to be robust. Aside from the wider debate on Holyrood, I cannot conceive of why the information has not been robust. We should make that point before we proceed. The whole point of considering this matter a month early is to assist the SPCB in ensuring that it has an endorsed budget, as it were, before the Executive begins its programme.

To have presented numbers which, by the SPCB's own admission, are not sensible this year strikes me as—

What do you mean by robust, Andrew?

It is more a matter of what the SPCB means by robust.

It will not stand up to scrutiny.

Sir David says in his letter:

"The information on costs and timescales . . . do not allow the Corporate Body to provide the Parliament with sufficiently robust information."

Given that that letter was supposed to form our deliberations on the SPCB's budget before we go on to deliberate on the Executive's budget, it is very difficult for us to do so.

There are clearly difficulties with this year in particular, but I still think that there is a problem with the numbers.

Is this not likely to be a one-off because of the particular item concerned?

Yes, I hope so.

We hope that, at least by this time next year, things will have been clarified.

We may say that this is a one-off, but Andrew has raised a very important point. "Sufficiently robust" is unusually lyrical language. What is really meant is unreliable information.

Perhaps imprecise, as opposed to unreliable, Keith.

Whatever you like—it is still not good enough. I have talked to one or two architects over the past few months who are extremely concerned about how the project is being run. I do not want to go into the details, but with big projects like this, there is often a continuing problem with costs, let alone with meeting deadlines. We must investigate this matter to ensure that the situation does not get worse. This is an on-going process, not a one-off event.

Points have been made about what we expect in future. Sir David is suggesting that there is a problem now. We would not accept such a problem in future.

Can we say that although we accept the SPCB's estimates, we are concerned that its budget processing is not particularly satisfactory, and that although we understand that there are reasons for that, we expect it to be more reliable in future?

Yes. That is the view of those who have contributed, and I am happy to suggest that it is the committee's view, which will be recorded in the Official Report. We have expressed our opinion.

What happens next with the SPCB figures? Is it the case that they are lodged with us, but that we do not take a view or deliberate on them at this stage?

The figures are due to come back to us in August, when the SPCB next reports to us on its expenditure estimates for 2001-02.