First, we will consider the letter from the Minister for Finance, FI/00/3/1, dated 31 January, which was in response to my letter of 20 December, FI/00/3/4, on the written agreements.
The gist of the minister's letter is to accept our recommendations. At the end of the letter, he promises
The last paragraph of the letter circumscribes the whole process on agreements and is very helpful.
Sorry, I am slightly late. Have you just said that you think that Jack McConnell's letter meets our requests?
He meets the first request. It is what we suggested in my letter of 20 December.
This is the paragraph on the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body?
Yes.
The minister said that he would put the figures in cash terms and that he would give the real-terms figures at the same time.
In paragraph 4 of his letter, and again over the page, the minister comments about where he might place information. In the interests of good management and a good relationship between the minister and the committee, that information should be sent to the clerk of this committee, so that she can circulate it and the committee can stand over the flows of information. It should not be put into the pond of loose information in the Scottish Parliament information centre.
Are you asking for a special arrangement whereby members of this committee have the information circulated to us by the clerk? That seems a reasonable request.
It would put an obligation on the minister automatically to send that information to the committee clerk.
That is what we will ask him to do. The papers will still be placed in the information centre, but we will ask that Sarah Davidson be sent a copy so that we are fully aware of it as soon as possible.
Our request for the information to be included in the budgeting or supporting documents has still not been met. Jack McConnell seems to be making the same suggestion as he did at the start of this process.
Do you have a copy of my letter of 20 December?
Yes.
In his letter of 20 December, the convener stated:
In my letter of 20 December, we asked that
We are talking about two different issues.
Are we on the agreement on the budgeting process?
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about paragraph 4 of Jack McConnell's letter to you.
I thought that Andrew Wilson had gone back to the agreement on the budgeting process. I apologise.
I was on paragraph 4 of Jack McConnell's letter as well. I beg your pardon. Have we agreed on the paragraph that refers to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body?
I suggested that we were agreed on the first matter, as the minister has acceded to our request on that, but he has not agreed to our request on the second matter.
Jack McConnell partly accedes to the request in your letter of 20 December. The budget plans in real terms will be made available to MSPs, but they will certainly not be easily accessible to
This issue has now been raised three times and the minister has taken no cognisance of the committee's views on it or on private finance initiative contracts. The minister's position has not changed.
Are we discussing the publication of the figures in cash terms and real terms?
Yes.
In paragraph 3 of his letter to the convener, the minister states:
That is what he said initially. He has not changed his position and there is no reason for us to change our position now. We have consistently argued that the information in cash terms and real terms should be part of the same documentation. Why—on the basis of the minister setting out his position in different words, but making the same point—should we change our position? That is absurd. The whole process has been absurd all the way through, because no cognisance has been taken of our view on this point.
I disagree. We are asking for the figures to be available in real terms and the minister is going to make them available in real terms.
He always said that he would do so.
We have discussed this before. Andrew Wilson wants the figures presented in a certain way in the budget document. Jack McConnell has stated that he will make them available in real terms to members and to the public but that he will present them in cash terms in the budget document. I do not think that that is a problem, as long as figures in real terms are available to MSPs and the public.
We are repeating the same boring debate that we have had on numerous occasions about whether the committee should encourage the minister, as Ken is effectively arguing, to show information in cash terms in one document—a significant document of public guidance—while people have to dig about somewhere else to find the figures in real terms. That would mean that the minister could parade around talking in cash terms. We are trying to ensure that there is one set of tables that will show people the figures in cash terms and in real terms. That is not an unreasonable request.
The minister has agreed to make the figures available in real terms, but only separately from the formal budget documents, which is not what we asked for.
This issue is crucial to the way in which the Executive and the Parliament are perceived. The public will not accept the publication of the figures in simple cash terms. If we are going to engage the public in a real debate about how we spend our money, the two sets of figures must be published together, so that we can see what the deflator is.
I am sorry to interrupt, but that is not the point. Jack McConnell clearly states in his letter that the figures will be published in real terms "at the same time". He has agreed that the figures will be made available in real and cash terms. The issue is the format in which they are published—whether the real-terms figures should be part of the budget documents or whether they should be available only through SPICe.
The figures should be part of the budget documents.
This debate is not about whether the figures should be available in real terms and cash terms; it is about how they should be accessed.
The figures should be made available to the public at the same time, in the same form and in the same document, so that people can see what we are talking about.
I think that that is broadly accepted.
Richard Simpson made a valid point. He stated that the real-terms figures and the cash figures should be published together so that it is easy to compare them. The minister suggests making the real-terms figures available through SPICe,
How will the budget documents be made available? How will an ordinary member of the public get access to a copy of the budget documents? Can Sarah Davidson answer that?
My understanding is that, in future, the budget documents will be published, but I do not know the precise mechanism for doing so.
Presumably that will not be done through SPICe; it will be done through the finance department.
I do not know whether a member of the public has the right to approach SPICe; I do not think that any member of the public could phone it and say, "Can I have x, y and z." If SPICe were a free distribution service, the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body budget would be under enormous strain and that would be the next matter that the Minister for Finance would have to address.
We can do no better than take John Swinney's comment as the summation of how we want this matter to be put to the minister. We want the information presented jointly, at the same time, so that the figures are equally accessible.
The point was made clear the last two times that we discussed the matter. The minister says that such details would not enhance the usefulness of budget documents, but we decided that that was not the case. If the information is provided sector by sector, it may as well be provided for individual deals. It strikes me as odd that we should have to ferret about for business case documents that are not immediately available.
Do we want to stand our ground and argue the case again?
Yes.
Have we agreed what is meant by larger and smaller projects? I cannot remember whether we had a figure for that. What might be regarded as small in the context of a £16 billion budget could be of profound importance to one of the smaller health boards. Do we have a clear definition?
The clerk says that we have clarified that, although I do not have the definition to hand.
We need to be careful about the level of detail that we request. There comes a point where there may be too much detail and too much paper. There must be clear pointers about where to obtain the lower levels of detail, although that detail itself need not be contained within the main document.
Are we talking about level 2 figures or cash and real-terms figures?
I am talking about the details of individual PFI projects. We could be asking for more detail than we require. It would be useful to have it clearly specified where the lower levels of detail—the individual business cases or whatever—are available.
Members of the public may not be able to access that material. Throughout the process, our aim has been to make the budget as accessible as possible. We cannot simply refer people elsewhere.
Elaine's suggestion might work for hyperlinks in an internet text document—to allow one to refer to another document. However, that will not be available to the person in the street who will simply pick up the document and walk off.
There is an inherent contradiction in the minister's letter, which makes me suspicious about where he is coming from. He says that he wants paragraph 6 of the agreement to stand—for the Executive to publish information sector by sector—but he refers to individual project information without giving it the status that he attaches to the sector-by-sector information. We have a legitimate interest in ensuring that the individual project information is available in a readily accessible form. I do not have the feeling that the paragraph is written in that spirit.
I agree with John Swinney. The PFI issue is so controversial that we must have that level of detail. Not only must the detail be readily accessible, but the figures must be clear. The details for each project must be uniformly presented because PFI breakdowns are highly complex and difficult to follow.
That was my point. It is all very well making information accessible, but it must be easily understandable as well. We must bear both those things in mind.
Do we agree to go back to the minister and say that we want the information to be available as we originally requested?
I am not sure that we are going to be successful on that point, although we might find that we do better on the previous one. However, it is important that we make our views clear. We should also include Elaine Thomson's comments about not wanting to engulf people in information.
We are concerned only about expenditure that has been committed. If a deal is still in the process of being struck, no expenditure has been committed from the budget and so there is no reason for us to have the information in the budget bill. Once the deal has been struck, there is no question of commercial confidentiality, as the National Audit Office told us at our previous meeting. It is a non-issue.
Okay. We will put that to the minister again before reaching agreements on the drafts.
I have a question about the balance sheet. We asked the minister why information on assets owned by Scottish Executive departments and agencies was not being made available, given the publication of the national asset register. Has that information been included?
I am not keen to raise new issues at this stage.
We raised the issue at a previous meeting when we discusses paragraph 6 of the written agreements. The minister said that the information was not available and I made the point that the Treasury published it every year. There is no reason why the Scottish Executive assets could not be drawn out of that. It was agreed that we would find out why that was the case.
The clerks will check that for us.
Do we have any signal as to when the process is expected to end? We were concerned about its ending after the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Bill had been enacted and months later we are no further forward. The minister has not moved an inch over the past two months.
That is the issue that was raised when the Parliament was considering the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Bill. We were being asked to sign up to the bill before the written agreements were in place. We are in just the situation that some of us who spoke in that debate feared: we are trying to press the minister to come to terms with positions that are supported by committees but to which the Executive is not willing to accede. We must make it clear that these are the views of the Finance Committee and that we want to conclude the matter so that we can proceed with the appropriate structure in place.
I am sure that all members of the committee will agree with that point. We will ensure that the letter to the minister includes those views. I am sure that the minister's civil servants either watch the committee meeting or read the Official Report. We can only hope that they will give due weight to the unequivocal views of committee members on the subject.
Meeting adjourned.
On resuming—