Official Report 215KB pdf
Agenda item 3 concerns the budget. A briefing paper has been circulated to members. We are moving into the budget process for 2005-06. The committee is invited to note the arrangements and timetable for this year's stage 2 consideration of the Executive budget and to consider the approach that it wishes to take. We are still awaiting the publication of both the spending review and the draft budget. That makes our job quite difficult, as we have an incredibly tight timescale within which to scrutinise those documents and to reach a view on them.
Do we have an indication of the reason for the delay in preparation of the documents? Does it involve any change from last year in the nature of the figures that are presented that will confuse us further?
We do not know the reason for the delay. I would like all the comments from last year that are included in the paper to be kept as live comments. At the very least, we can try to track through them, but we are in the same situation as every committee—we have to work with the system.
Given our experience last year, it is important that we ensure that our adviser, Ken Thomson, can consider closely the figures that are provided and draw comparisons with what happened last year. For a certain element of last year's figures, we did not have an appropriate base for comparison. The strength of the process that we are about to begin is the consistency of having Ken Thomson again. We came to trust him and the way in which he dealt with the issues last year, so we must rely on him heavily this time.
That is correct. It would be useful to revisit the parking of moneys in different budgets to see how those moneys were actually spent. You are right that on the issues that we picked up last year, we should take a fine-toothed comb approach. We will rely pretty heavily on Professor Thomson for that.
I have a general suggestion that might exert a bit of pressure. We have the pressure of a date by which we must report. Would it help to get information timeously from the Executive to say that we will report by a certain time after documents become available?
The dates are set by working back from the statutory dates for the Budget (Scotland) Bill in the early part of 2005. The Finance Committee is limited by those dates; it must report and initiate a parliamentary debate before the bill process begins in January.
There is no back-pressure on the Executive to provide its part of the jigsaw timeously.
I suspect that that pressure might come not from the committee, but from members' discussions with various members of the Executive. Any pressure that could be applied would be intelligent and would assist the quality of our scrutiny and the robustness of the process.
Exactly.
The clerks hope that we will slot in a meeting with the minister on 27 October or 3 November, which would let us consider a draft report on 10 or 17 November. That is a pretty sharp turnaround and requires Professor Ken Thomson to deliver for us in that timescale and members to get up to speed on the documents. As the clerk outlined, we have a timetable within which we must submit our comments to the Finance Committee. If that committee does not have our comments, it cannot consider them before it reports to the Executive.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—