Finance Committee, 26 Feb 2002

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 26, 2002

Official Report 223KB pdf

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Budget Process 2003-04

Agenda item 5 is a paper from Professor Midwinter on the budget process.

I will bring the committee up to date. I met officials yesterday to discuss the two issues that were referred to me for discussion—EYF and agency spending. They relate to the guidance that we might give committees.

I received a fairly positive response on both issues. There seems to be little difficulty with the Executive's producing the narrative that we want for EYF. On agency spending, officials will explore further with their colleagues—particularly those in the health department—whether block allocations can be disaggregated. I left the officials in no doubt that I thought that they could be. I could do the figures for local government and I am sure that, with a little effort, someone could do them for health. Officials will examine that and come back to me. They said that they were happy with both issues.

That is important, because the effort this year is to focus the budget more closely on budget choices rather than processes. The interesting point that was made in the discussion was that when committees had made two recommendations for change, ministers had accepted them readily. I think that ministers would welcome it if committees made clear recommendations. The committee's strategy is pushing at an open door. If we can get the other committees to focus on the priorities within their budgets, we will get progress.

My paper FI/02/4/2 was drafted in the light of those discussions to help the committees focus clearly on the key questions. The first page simply gives background material on what we have already agreed. In paragraph 5, I have suggested questions that will help the committees to focus more clearly on the decisions that they face.

The committee that I was involved with asked the minister to deal with three outstanding issues before the next year's budget. I do not know whether every committee does that. Indeed, I noted that that particular committee had let slip the issues that had not been addressed the previous year. At the start of each committee's process, ministers should be asked, "What have you done about that matter that you agreed to look at?"

Each committee should then ask whether the budget proposals are consistent with the Executive's strategy and objectives. We previously discussed whether the budget could include a ministerial statement on strategy. The suggestion is that such a statement could be included within the First Minister's foreword to the annual expenditure report or budget documents. There is no reason why the documents should not have a firm statement on strategy. I ask the committees to appraise that.

The individual subject committees should consider whether they want to recommend any change in the balance of spending between the budget heads. That is what the committees are supposed to do.

Related to that, the committees should consider that they have a real opportunity for influencing what might be done with the freer resources—despite ministerial reluctance to comment on the sum—that might flow from the spending review and EYF. We should encourage the committees to flag up a priority, especially if it is based on evidence that they have taken during the budget process.

At its previous meeting, the committee discussed Norman Flynn's research on moving to outcome budgeting. I suggest that the measuring of outcomes could be dealt with in the AER. Committees should consider whether the AER provides evidence on performance and the meeting of targets and on progress towards outcomes. If individual committees could suggest alternative measures, that would be a positive thing.

Members will remember that we discussed the need to rationalise the documents by perhaps making the draft budget slimmer in size and focusing on the changes in expenditure. The Executive suggests that we do things the other way around for this year and slim down the AER, because several detailed decisions will not be taken until the spending review is known.

The suggestion is that, the following year, the Executive will then revert to the model that we have suggested. The Executive is happy to go along with the changes in that light. I think that that will mean that the AER will be more strategic in focus and will try to flag up the issues before the decisions are taken. That would assist our process.

It would be helpful to know what groups committees took evidence from. Having talked to the parliamentary staff about other committees, I know that some committees are having difficulties. One person said to me, "We have at least 40 groups that we could consult." I replied, "You will just have to take a fair sample each year." I believe that recommendations have greater weight if they reflect the evidence that committees have received.

Finally, committees should consider whether there is any other pressing budgetary issue that they want to draw to the attention of the Finance Committee.

Those are the kinds of question that I had in mind that the individual committees should consider.

That is helpful. Two or three points occur to me. We will need to get the Executive to provide the committees with a clearer statement of the budgetary constraints in each area and how those relate to the bigger picture. People need to know the parameters within which they are operating. People need some kind of threshold statement so that they can work out what options they might reasonably wish to consider.

For example, although the Transport and the Environment Committee might want to recommend that half the health budget be given over to the building of roads or of a super-duper new rail link, that would not be a reasonable basis on which to expect to secure a budgetary change. The realistic parameters within which each committee is operating are probably a necessary given for them to do the work.

The minister has committed himself to flag up for the committees what new resources are available within the planning figures compared with the current year, and to do the same for capital expenditure to make it clear how much is new and how much is committed. Are you suggesting that the subject committee might look at a trade-off across budget heads?

That is more our responsibility. We need to encourage committees to make real choices. If they recommend shifting budgets around within transport and say that more should be spent on this and less should be spent on that, they need to know the parameters within which they are operating. I presume that, in that context, it would be helpful for them to have some equivalent of what in local government is usually called the comprehensive spending review.

Does each committee get a presentation from the department concerned about the budget? They should do.

It varies from committee to committee.

Someone from the department concerned should explain where they are and what they are proposing. The Minister for Finance and Local Government helped to focus the decisions for the Local Government Committee. That could be a mechanism to provide what you are looking for.

The Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee has certainly taken evidence on budgets.

The Transport and the Environment Committee typically does as well, but I am not sure that every committee does. It might not be relevant for every committee.

One answer that we got toward the end of the evidence from the previous witnesses exposes a difficulty that committees have. I know that the witnesses were talking about EYF when they said that money had been plonked under certain headings, but it opens up the thought that other sums of money might also be plonked under certain headings. If committees knew whether sums were committed or had just been plonked under a heading, they would have a lot more flexibility.

You are not suggesting, by any chance, that we have a load of plonkers there.

We will not pursue that point any further.

The budgetary parameters and some indication of how much is committed, how much is new and what the implications of that are would be probably useful.

It struck me that point (e) in paragraph 5 in Arthur Midwinter's paper should probably appear higher up the list—it should appear before point (c). We should ask questions about performance and targets in relation not only to outcomes but to outputs and how happy we are with them. If you go through the budgetary document, you will see something on outputs at the start of every section, but it is often difficult to reconcile the outputs with the budgetary allocation. We should flag up to the committees that that area can give them the greatest purchase on the substantive advantages of what is being proposed in budgetary terms. We should say that to the committees before we invite them to recommend changes in the balance of spending between budget heads.

Does Arthur Midwinter want to say any more about what he is asking committees to do in recommending changes in the balance of spending between budget heads? What does he anticipate coming out of that?

There are two budgetary choices facing committees. The first is what their priority would be if there were additional resources to be spent. Some committees may not have additional resources and the question then is whether, within the budget total, they want to make recommendations to spend more or less on the different sub-programmes within it.

The Finance Committee has previously talked about some of those issues. Committees need to be encouraged strongly, when they are not dealing with extra available resources, to identify where they want to move money from. They must be clear about where they want to spend less. They cannot say that they want to spend more when more is not available. They must balance that.

I have already seen two of the background papers that the parliamentary staff are beginning to produce. Those focus committees on the areas where they can move money around, on the basis of their work the previous year, and ask whether they want to suggest any changes.

My point is on the back of the question that you raise at paragraph 5(b), which I think should go further. At present, the question reads:

"Does the Committee feel the departmental spending proposals are consistent with the Executive's Strategy and Objectives?"

We could also ask whether the committees agree with the priorities of the Executive. That question might focus matters more tightly, as it would give the committees the idea that they could shuffle figures around within a particular budget.

I would like to roll on to another point. A lot of the new legislation that is going through the subject committees brings fairly substantial costs, and the committees have a responsibility to examine those costs and their implications for roll-out. We are beginning to see the need for the committees to consider whether those costs will require the prioritisation of resource within existing budgets to be transferred in order to accommodate the new legislation, particularly if the relevant minister has not made the exact costs clear enough.

That consideration is not just for the Finance Committee to undertake when it receives the financial memorandums that come with bills. The committees need to be given some advice on how to look at the effect of new legislation on existing programmes and on the future availability of budget.

Do you mean that that consideration should take place as the new legislation is going through, or should it happen as part of the budget process?

I mean that the committees should consider those issues when they review the legislation.

You are saying that the committees should think through the resource consequences—

I am thinking of the example of the Sutherland report. If a committee is going to debate with the minister the remit of and definitions in the Sutherland report, it needs to have an idea of the costs that are involved.

That is not part of the budget process.

I agree, but consideration of those issues will affect the budget in the longer term and if committees took that approach, they would be tuned into the budget documents when they come to look at them.

The subject committees have not done much of that work yet, whether or not they have been asked to do it. We may not need to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, but we do need to establish the principle that committees will look at the budget options and that they will get help to do that work.

As far as I am concerned, we should try Professor Midwinter's approach this year and see what the consequences are. Some of the committees will grab the process and run with it, while others might be a little more reluctant. However, I think that we should review the situation in the light of practice. We should not get too tied down on the detail this year, as undoubtedly the process will change in future. I am quite content with the approach suggested by Professor Midwinter. We should go ahead and issue the guidance.

We should bear in mind the fact that this year there will be a spending review down south. Everyone will lose the plot, given the amount of new information that will come out. People will not know whether the money is new money, replacement money or money that has been relabelled. We faced those problems during the year in which the budget process might as well have been abandoned. The situation got so complicated that the subject committees were unable to follow it. Of course, that was because of the lack of time.

The Finance Committee has an opportunity to influence the process. Money is going to be allocated—that is the important point.

The Equal Opportunities Committee was one of the committees that was critical of the budget process last year. It raised its inability to identify some of the gender aspects in the budgets. In our previous guidance to committees, we asked them to focus in on those aspects a little. The Executive is doing a lot of work in that area, and there is also the work of the Scottish women's budget group. Given that there was quite a lot of criticism last year, it would be helpful if we were to ask committees for their thoughts on the gender aspects of the budget and whether they believe that matters are improving.

One could argue that the same point applies to the issue of sustainability.

I have held discussions with the clerks who service the Equal Opportunities Committee. They have sent me material and I am working with them on preparing a background paper for the Equal Opportunities Committee. Obviously, that paper will not refer to the same functional heads, but it is clear that, even at this stage, the Equal Opportunities Committee is not sure which aspects of the Executive's budget have a direct bearing on equality issues.

I am proposing that we have a quick equality audit in which we identify those aspects of the budget which clearly target particular groups, such as those with HIV and AIDS. We would also identify those aspects of the main services to which there could be an ethnic or gender dimension and get the committees to focus on them.

A supplementary paper on that could go to the committees once I have had a chance to examine it in more detail. In the past, I have been asked to examine paperwork to see whether we are satisfied on gender issues. Very few comments have ever been made about that, because of the way in which the information is provided. The committees are now getting frustrated. Their sole comment on the budgetary process appears to be that the Finance Committee has not made any progress.

I want to focus on the practicalities for the committees this year. Some of the documents that they have been considering are more relevant to the UK. They talk about the tax consequences and welfare benefits rather than spending programmes here. I will cut through that for the Equal Opportunities Committee and make a start. The committee also needs to think about funding research to help it to make progress.

In that context, is it better to leave that issue with the Equal Opportunities Committee until it gets clarification?

I am hoping that we will draft a paper that will come out as guidance to the subject committees through it rather than through us.

But we have to have some kind of imprint on it.

I agree: the Equal Opportunities Committee can produce a paper, but the instruction to the subject committees has to come from the Finance Committee.

I will draft the paper. I will leave it to the committees to work out how it gets processed.

I think that the question at paragraph 5(f) in your paper should be recast slightly to emphasise to committees that recommendations for changes will have to be supported by evidence. It is not an issue of from whom evidence has been taken; it is an issue of what evidence is available. That might include from whom the evidence has been gathered, but the real emphasis must be on making a case.

That is what the financial issues advisory group hoped for.

With those minor amendments, are members broadly content with the route that Professor Midwinter is suggesting?

Including David Davidson's amendment to the question at paragraph 5(b).

I suggested reordering and there is the issue of getting people to focus on the link between suggested outputs and the budget. We should bear those revisions in mind.

The other link issue that we have to consider is whether we wish to appoint reporters to subject committees and to which committees. We have already agreed in principle that we want to work closely with the Health and Community Care Committee and the Transport and the Environment Committee. Given the work that the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee is doing, we might also want to have a reporter on it to report back to the Finance Committee. Are members content to have reporters?

What would be the role of the reporter, given that the subject committees report back to us anyway?

The point would be to have someone from the Finance Committee participating in budgetary discussions.

I did that last year with the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee. It was not a huge role: I provided clarification of what the Finance Committee was looking for and whether the committee should go into certain matters. That was the gist of it.

Andrew Wilson went to the Health and Community Care Committee and found that far more technical questions about the ability to change things were coming back. Answering those questions is almost an adviser's role. The message was mixed.

Perhaps you could take the matter up through the conveners liaison group, convener.

The matter was discussed in the conveners liaison group a couple of weeks ago. There seemed to be a view that conveners found it useful to have Finance Committee reporters sitting in on budgetary discussions. The view from the users' end seemed more positive than you are suggesting, David.

When we saw the formal report to the committee, I understood who was driving which bit of the discussion, who had started to make comments before backing off and how their thoughts had been swamped. How committees proceed is up to them and their conveners, but the exercise was helpful.

When a member of the Finance Committee happens also to be a member of another committee, we could get that person to liaise with the committee concerned. For example, I am a member of the Transport and the Environment Committee. I could articulate what the Finance Committee is looking for in the budgetary discussions that the Transport and the Environment Committee undertakes. Elaine Thomson is a member of the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee.

I support that suggestion. I have mixed feelings about the value of appointing Finance Committee reporters to subject committees. In the first year or two of the Parliament's existence, that might have been more worth while because members were unfamiliar with the budget process, but we are beginning to move away from that situation. Do not some of the subject committees intend to appoint budget advisers, at least for a short period? More support will be available to them. Where appropriate, I provide input from the Finance Committee into the discussions of the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee. The convener has made a useful suggestion.

We could designate points of contact or give individuals a communicating role. The Health and Community Care Committee presents us with more difficulties because, as far as I know, no member of the Finance Committee is also a member of the Health and Community Care Committee.

I would be happy to act as the committee's point of contact with the Health and Community Care Committee, if you think it is important that the person who does that should have a background in health.

That would be helpful, particularly given the complexities of the subject.

If some committees did not have a point of contact with this committee, they might feel disadvantaged. Last year, Donald Gorrie attended meetings of the Local Government Committee.

I would be happy to attend meetings of the Local Government Committee.

I, too, could have a go at that. I used to sit on the Local Government Committee and I know its members pretty well.

In that case, Jamie Stone can do that job.

I am sorry, Brian—do you want to do it? I will toss you for it.

Maybe Brian Adam could act as our point of contact with the Holyrood progress group.

The other committee whose remit covers major items of spending is the Education, Culture and Sport Committee.

I do not mind which committee I liaise with, as long as its meetings do not clash with anything else that I am doing. I know that the meetings of the Local Government Committee do not. I would be happy to attend meetings of the Education, Culture and Sport Committee, if the committee would like me to.

Brian Adam can act as our point of contact with the Education, Culture and Sport Committee, and Jamie Stone can act as our point of contact with the Local Government Committee.

Some committees meet on Tuesday mornings. There would not be much point in our appointing a reporter to those.

The Social Justice Committee and the justice committees also deal with major items of spending.

I do not mind attending meetings of the two justice committees.

They meet together to scrutinise the budget.

I can act as our point of contact with the justice committees, as long as they do not meet on a Tuesday morning.

The Health and Community Care Committee usually meets on a Wednesday morning, does it not?

I think so.

I have to avoid clashes with meetings of the Finance and Audit Committees, which take place on Tuesdays.

Perhaps we can nominate Tom McCabe in his absence as our point of contact with the Social Justice Committee.

That is just up his street.

We could ask him whether he wants to volunteer—let us put it like that.

If there is a clash and members cannot attend meetings of a particular committee, I would be happy to do so, provided that I do not have something else on. We are talking about one or two committee meetings at most. We would need to attend only for the discussion of the budget.

Having members of the Finance Committee attend meetings of other committees would show that we want to work closely with the other committees. That is the message that we are trying to convey.

If David Davidson is unable to attend meetings of the Health and Community Care Committee because of a clash, I would be happy to do so. I do not mind which committee's meetings I attend. I also served for a while on the Social Justice Committee.

Maybe, in that context, we should get away from the idea of a reporter as such and talk about people as nominated contacts who would work with the relevant subject committees.

There is a difference between the two. Reporters can stay at meetings if committees decide to go into private.

Well, we were all thrown out last time.

I was not thrown out.

I am sure that this issue was investigated, because there were difficulties. Perhaps the situation has changed, but reporters were not allowed to stay during private committee sessions.

Unless they sign a confidentiality agreement.

Perhaps this is another issue that we can take up with the conveners liaison group. We could tell the other conveners that we are intending to proceed in this way and ask them not to chuck us out for budget discussions if we are meant to be there.

The conveners can suspend standing orders for certain things, can they not?

Well, we will check out the legal aspects and see what happens.

We will now move on to agenda item 6. Arthur Midwinter has prepared another paper that suggests that we examine cross-cutting issues to consider the budget from a broader perspective.

I have a suggestion that is not in this paper.

That is okay: I have included examples to illustrate the topic.

We should let Arthur speak to his paper and then discuss any additional suggestions.

The paper has two objectives, both of which focus on taking a different view of the budget. Rather than focus on the function of the budget, we should take a wider perspective through examining the needs of client groups and different areas of the country, for example. We also need a longer-term view that will allow us to examine and make sense of any pattern that might emerge over a number of years. The approach is very similar to the one used in what in local government are now called best-value reviews, on which I have acted as consultant for local authorities.

I am still not clear about how we might operationalise that. I thought about a working group, on which two committee members might be members. Then I thought about creating a sub-committee that would have overall responsibility for the subject. The professionals who are involved in the process would meet when the legwork is being done and clear up all the technical issues before it reached committee level.

I have an open mind about how we progress this issue. Basically, I want to take an in-depth look at a number of issues. During yesterday's training exercise, we discovered that the Executive has carried out similar exercises. I am not sure whether the documents are in the public domain or are for internal use, but I found out that the Executive has reviewed one of the issues that I have suggested—drugs-related problems.

We should involve others in the exercise. For example, important professional associations should send a representative. Furthermore, I have had a brief discussion with the Auditor General for Scotland about sending a member of his team, members of which are allocated according to portfolio. He would be delighted for someone to take part in the group, provided that that person did not have to do the work. As Audit Scotland has access to a lot of information and knows where everything is, its representatives would be very valuable.

We should also have a special adviser or researcher who would be funded to draft the report. For example, if we were considering the elderly, we could bring in the Scottish expert on the elderly—if such a person exists. The group should ask the wider questions that get missed in the budgetary process, but there should be no more than one exercise a year. This year, we should find a manageable topic for the working group's first report, because next year we will be into elections and the committee might not be able to approve a topic for next year by the time committee members get re-elected and return to Parliament.

Or not.

Or not, as the case may be.

The basic recommendation is to take a wider look at the budget, consider appropriate need indicators for the particular programmes and find out whether the balance of the spending programmes makes sense.

Do members have any questions? What do you think of the general procedure?

That is a reasonable suggestion. Perhaps we should involve a couple of committee members to find out whether we want to use that procedure. We should not be involved in too much technical detail about how best to achieve that. That is probably best left to the professionals. I served on the Audit Committee for a while and Audit Scotland people are impressive individuals who have a great grasp of what goes on and the real questions that need to be asked. They would be most helpful.

It is a kicking-over-stones task, to find out what really goes on beneath the figures.

Having the group as a sub-committee of this committee is perhaps not the way to go. Perhaps members of this committee should merely dip in and out of the group to check in which direction it is moving. That would be more meaningful and might give more independence to the group's views and its perception.

It would be a working group, rather than a formal sub-committee.

Yes.

Members' involvement will be important for steering the group, so that it does not go off into areas that will not interest members. Members must keep an overall grip on what is going on.

I presume that those members would occasionally report progress to the committee. That would be helpful.

Professor Midwinter pointed out that the Executive has already indulged in—perhaps that is not the right word—has done this exercise for the drugs problem. That might mean that it has experience on which we can draw. The fact that the Executive has done the drugs issue might mean that that issue would not be the best one for us to do, but the Executive's exercise could provide a model.

Perhaps we could use the group as an avenue to explore our interest in the voluntary sector, rather than do something that would duplicate the current work of the Social Justice Committee or the outstanding remit of finishing the work that was done by Donald Gorrie and Adam Ingram. If we considered the voluntary sector in a cross-cutting way, that would complement the work of the Social Justice Committee and not run counter to it.

The partnership approach is another area in which the voluntary sector seeks parity of esteem but does not believe that it is getting it. The voluntary sector ends up appealing for funds under all sorts of schemes to this, that and the other one. The sector gets little pockets of money from here, there and everywhere. Perhaps we should pursue that issue.

I have experience of that issue because I did a review for the then National Lottery Charities Board in Scotland of the voluntary sector projects it funded. I am familiar with the voluntary sector if the committee wants to deal with it. How many Executive budgets does the voluntary sector cut across?

I think mainly just two: local government and health.

Some of the education budget?

Probably.

There would also be some social justice budget, because the Executive has been funding some voluntary sector bodies at national level. The advantage of the two areas that Elaine Thomson mentioned is perhaps that the Parliament does not look closely at them. Perhaps we should consider the voluntary sector across local government and health.

Much money comes in to the voluntary sector from donation or sponsorship from commercial organisations. I do not think that anyone has a real feel for how much that money amounts to. Voluntary sector organisations seem to have to become much more active in getting corporate support for this, that and the other, as well as having the flag days, the functions and the rest of it.

The big voluntary organisations—the professional voluntary sector, if you like—have full-time professionals for obtaining corporate support.

That is right. It would be interesting to know how much money is coming through that route to provide core services that in the past might have been within the remit of government. The voluntary sector would like that to be clarified so that we understand it. That would tie back into—

Is that a legitimate concern for us?

It would tie back into the budgets that are voted for local government and health.

I have two concerns about that. I sat on the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations' major review of the voluntary sector in the mid-1990s. A big concern that arose from the evidence that we took was that there is no single voluntary sector in Scotland. There is a big difference between the professional voluntary organisations and what one might call volunteering organisations. The issue is that they operate under different constraints and pressures.

That is what will be important to the voluntary sector—the fact that the larger, national organisations seem to be able to access support from the public purse at various levels. That contrasts with the more traditional means. The balance of funding as well as spending is important. We must establish whether the Executive is getting the balance right in respect of the various parts of the voluntary sector and where else further down the budget the money is going. Perhaps the Executive should be taking a view about how much of the local government budget should be given to the partner organisations to deliver the services. The same might be true of the health budget and other publicly funded bodies. The money comes from a variety of sources.

One of the interesting findings in the work for the lottery board was the difference in the quality of the bids—some were handwritten, whereas others were carefully polished because the organisations had funding. One of our recommendations was that the board should appoint people to help the local and really voluntary organisations to make bids.

I would not disagree, but I am not sure whether that comes under the heading of a cross-cutting review. Might it be better to consider it as an option for an inquiry and build on what the Social Justice Committee and Donald Gorrie have done? There are several different aspects to the issue—it would not be a straightforward review of what is spent under the different budgetary headings. I cannot help but wonder whether an inquiry would be a more appropriate vehicle.

I do not see the matter as a purely paper exercise. I would expect researchers to ask questions about quality, for example, in their fieldwork. The issue is not just about the figures, but about what is behind them.

The same argument would apply to drugs. National organisations carry out fundraising and have the capacity to make bids, whereas small local support groups do not have a clue and do not know whom to approach. They are all bidding for the same money and they all get money from the public purse. Should we have a view on where the balance of voluntary sector funding from the public purse should come from? Should some of it come from health or local government budgets? We need to know how to strike the balance. That is why I think that a cross-cutting approach would be worth while.

I would like to tie things together. Some of the topics that Arthur Midwinter identified in his first paper are too broad. If we were to do something on children, we would have to target our work on poorer or disadvantaged children, rather than on children in general, just to make things manageable. Brian Adam is clearly bidding for us to consider the voluntary sector. I suspect that today we need to agree an outline procedure for a cross-cutting review and ask Arthur Midwinter to come back to us with more focused options for a topic. We do not need to decide the topic today. We can reflect on our discussion and agree on a topic on Arthur Midwinter's further advice. Does that make sense to you, Arthur, or are you anxious to get a decision today?

I will do what you wish, although a delay would knock back the time that we will have to identify appropriate people, for example. However, I am not sure whether I would be the appropriate person to draft a project on the voluntary sector.

There are a number of considerations in identifying the best route to go down. I am not clear whether you are suggesting that we do just one inquiry. What are the constraints on doing more than one inquiry? Are they to do with the time, the money or the expertise that are available to the committee?

To do an inquiry properly, you will need to do it in depth. You will have to have witnesses. You will have to take evidence from various people. You will have researchers out in the field gathering data. You will have meetings of steering groups. You will then have someone bringing together all the evidence and drafting a report. That is time consuming. I found that to be the case when I worked on best-value reviews.

The reason for doing one inquiry is that this is the first time that the committee has done an inquiry and you do not want to be spread too thinly. There is no reason why you could not do more than one inquiry once you have had practice, but I would be wary of doing more than one straight away.

In a sense, the constraint is not the committee's time; it lies elsewhere.

It is the staff.

I have two questions. First, is there a budget that we can inquire into? Secondly, as far as desk research and interviews are concerned, can we link with university departments? They will be doing the work from an academic point of view, which is, I presume, what we are looking for.

There are two ways of doing that. One is to have an adviser and the other is to have a contract—such as the one that I had with the committee—that draws from the Parliament's research budget. I would rather that the committee had an academic under its control than that it tried to tap into what academics do, because the committee will get the academics' hobby-horses.

I thought that advisers worked under direction.

A committee should have under its control someone who knows the field and who can tap into the research that exists.

To some extent the topic that we choose is governed by whether we have anybody who is well placed to address it. I tried to flag that up when I asked whether we must choose a subject today. Ultimately, it is crucial that we are clear about what we want to do and whether somebody can do it.

When the committee has discussed cross-cutting issues, two have come up time and again—drugs and the money that is spent on rural issues. It might be worth examining drugs, given that we have never held such an inquiry before, that we are not sure how we want to progress, and that some work has already been done on drugs. Such an inquiry might help us to be clearer about what we want to do if we address an area in which some work has already been done.

On the report that was done within the Executive, were decisions taken as a result of it, or was it just an internal review? At the end of such an exercise one would want a set of recommendations that should be implemented. My one concern is that the Executive might feel that it has already produced a report and made its changes, and it may ask, "Why are you coming along after the event?"

A rural affairs inquiry could be conducted jointly with the Rural Development Committee, because that committee has struggled to handle the budget. Almost all the rural affairs budget is AME. In the early 1990s the then Scottish Office produced a report on rural spending, which could be the starting point of an inquiry.

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities did some work on that in 1995 or 1996.

I am talking about a report by the Scottish Office.

Another issue that I wonder about is modernising government. Quite a lot of money is being spent on that but—as the committee has noted previously—it is not obvious from the budget documents how the money is being spent.

I confess to not knowing what "modernising" means.

I am glad that you said that.

One way forward might be for me to take two or three of the subjects and to speak to academics working in those fields and ask them to draft outlines. I do not know what constraints contracting would impose. People would be unhappy about wasting their time writing papers for the committee if someone else got the contract.

The problem is that procurement must be open. We cannot make any promises.

Could we invite institutions to make their pitches before the committee?

We must decide what topic we want to investigate and then undertake a procurement process. We cannot sit in committee and decide that we like a bit of one thing, but not of another.

Perhaps we could bring to the committee's next meeting a paper listing some of the topics that have been suggested by Arthur Midwinter and members. That paper could include a précis setting out what investigation of those topics might involve and who might be available to support such work, should we decide to go ahead with it. We might find when drafting that paper that certain topics are ruled out because it is difficult to get support to investigate them, even though they look good on paper.

I would feel confident about writing a précis on voluntary sector and rural spending. I would not feel confident about writing one on modernising government.

Regeneration and the provision of services to poor communities are areas of huge cross-cutting interest, but I do not know how manageable it would be to investigate them.

That would be a bigger issue than the other two subjects that have been suggested.

Both regeneration and rural spending are big issues that have all sorts of conceptual implications.

Do we agree that David McGill, in conjunction with Arthur Midwinter, should consider possible topics for investigation and provide the committee with a report from which we can make a selection? I suggest that we also contact the Executive to see whether it is prepared to give us a presentation on its cross-cutting review process, such as has been undertaken with regard to drugs. Such a presentation would give us insight into how the process was conducted, what issues the Executive identified through it and what benefits the process produced.

Members indicated agreement.

When do you need the report?

We need it to be ready in two weeks' time. We are not looking for anything more than an outline of three or four possibilities. If you think that something is not worth doing, do not spend much time telling us why that is the case. We want you to come back with three or four topics that it would be feasible for us to pursue. Does that make sense?

Yes.

That concludes that public part of the meeting. I ask members of the press and public to leave and thank them for attending.

Meeting continued in private until 12:22.