Chamber and committees

Many of the previous excuses have been, “There’s been a fiscal event, so we’ll have to wait till after the spending review,” then, “We’re right up against the autumn budget, so we might as well put it off till after that,” and then, suddenly, “It’s the pre-election period.” Is that a risk? Should we ask the Government to set out in writing, to the committee and to you, a clear timetable for the spending review and the MTFS over the next year? You must have had a conversation with the Government about what that process looks like.

Thank you.

What you describe is, to me, very opaque in terms of our ability as a committee, as a Parliament and, frankly, as members of the public, to scrutinise and understand what the Government is doing with the money. I go back to the previous year, where we had the second of three in-year emergency spending reviews—emergency budgets halfway through the year—but at the end of the year there was a substantial carryover into the following year, so there was a significant underspend.

We are in the situation where we appear to have panics from the Government around spending and measures being taken or not taken. To illustrate that further, we had evidence from the minister a few weeks ago on the autumn budget revisions. The target of £500 million in cuts was set in the emergency crisis budget in September, but then we were told that only £180 million—I believe it was that, or £188 million, perhaps—of those savings had been made.

I suppose that my question is whether we should be concerned about that on-going, up-and-down management panic between one budget that is set in December and what happens in various different fiscal statements throughout the year, in relation to our ability to understand what resources are available to public services—and, frankly, public services’ ability to understand what resources are available to them.

We are talking about the macro level in terms of how the Government is managing the budget, but I am thinking about the impact of that kind of up-and-down, back-and-forth approach that the Government has taken on public services. I will give you an illustration. NHS Tayside, in the region that I live in and represent, told me and my colleagues at the end of last week that, at the start of the year, it had been set a deficit cap of £37 million. A few months ago, the board told MSPs that it was going to manage about £20 million of the deficit. It went through a process of trying to understand how it could save money and then, lo and behold, at the start of November—unsurprisingly, to be frank, after the UK budget—the Scottish Government agreed, “No, you can go full hell-for-leather and have the £37 million.”

Do you agree that that up-and-down approach is not driving efficiency and promoting responsible management, and that there is actually a real cost to it? Do you think that that is the case in terms of the way that public services are managed?

Do you think that, in the budget statement tomorrow, we will see the ScotWind money being put back, for instance? Is that the kind of measure that you are anticipating?

I have a couple of quick questions.

On this year’s budget, I think that the committee has probably shared a little bit of your confusion, David, about where we have ended up. You identified an additional £2.6 billion in recent sets of consequentials this year, but we are being told by the Government that it has assumed that that money was coming. Is there any indication as to where we would have ended up if that money had not arrived?

Finally, we have headlines in Scotland this morning about the Auditor General sounding alarm bells, which chimes closely in many regards with your recently published analysis of the NHS. However, is the overall management of the finances that I have described not part of the problem? You have described the significant uplift in finance this year. Is now not the moment to try and find a new direction and to try to change and reform services, rather than doing that when spending is decreasing or there is a huge amount of panic? Is now not the time to change direction?

I really appreciate the time that the committee is giving me. I thank the committee for its consideration of the petition and its support of my constituent over the past 18 months, and for the work that you have done. I also place on record my thanks to my constituent, Caroline Gordon, for her representations on behalf of young citizens across the country. Our democracy is enhanced by that form of citizenship, as is so often demonstrated through the work of the committee.

I note the evidence that the convener has referred to, and I tend to agree with the conclusions that he has reached. It strikes me that there has been something of a circling of the wagons, if I can put it that way. Judging by the responses, there appears to be real resistance to presenting the transparency from university entrance data that Ms Gordon and I have been calling for, despite the representations made by the committee.

I find the rationale that has been set out by the Government, the sector and the commissioner not to be particularly credible, frankly. If there is no issue, as they have claimed, there should be no problem with presenting the data publicly. Perhaps it is just that I have greater faith in the Scottish public’s ability to understand complex issues than some of the people involved perhaps do. That is a great pity, given that some of them are in higher learning institutions.

The committee has probably taken the issue as far as it can at this stage. It is potentially now a political question ahead of the 2026 election. I would imagine that, at the very least, citizens might call for greater transparency through the election of new MSPs in 2026.

I wanted to put on record those reflections and to thank the committee for its time. I will leave it to the committee to consider what, if any, action it wishes to take next.

For context, you might be aware that the Scottish Government has a commitment to provide a pay policy to the Scottish Fiscal Commission but has failed to do so for the past two years in a row. That is part of the reason why there is quite a lot of interest in the issue from the committee.

On page 45 of the budget, the Treasury published a graph on the budget’s distribution effect, which showed that

“Overall, on average, all but the richest 10% of households will benefit as a percentage of income from policy decisions in 2025-26.”

Does the distributional effect of this budget show a significant departure from previous recent budgets?

Is it credible to want to realise those benefits—to produce the additional resource that will go to the public services—without raising taxes?