Chamber and committees

You will be glad to know that there will be questions. Obviously, I am not going to hog things too much, because time will be against us today more than I had hoped.

My first question is about the fact that you intend to publish one of those reports every five years. The Office for Budget Responsibility first started producing such reports in 2011 and has been producing them every year. Given the fact that there can be significant changes within a five-year period—such as a change of Government, a pandemic or Brexit—do you think that, in the future, you will look at changing that frequency? Rather than the reports being produced on a set timeframe, might you produce them in response to specific events?

The overall story is critical, because it is quite clear that Governments need to look very seriously at what is likely to happen. One of the things that grabbed my attention was the fact that, over 50 years, we are looking at a 72 per cent increase in output but a 218 per cent increase in health expenditure. The good news is that we are all going to live longer, but the bad news is that it will be a lot more expensive to treat us because of new and more expensive treatments, the introduction of technology and so on. Governments north and south of the border have to take serious cognisance of those developments.

In the report, there is a very interesting graph that shows that there will be divergence in population numbers. Figure 2.4 shows that, over 25 years, there will be a 31 per cent increase in Midlothian’s population but a 16.2 per cent decrease in Inverclyde’s population. You say quite clearly that you did not look at population numbers by local authority, but it is interesting that National Records of Scotland is predicting a 2.5 per cent increase in the population over that period, whereas the SFC is predicting a 0.5 per cent increase. That is obviously a difference of more than 100,000 people across Scotland. Can you explain why there is a significant difference in the figures that have been produced by the SFC and National Records of Scotland?

Yes, indeed.

In your submission, you said that net in-migration of 19,000 a year is not that significant, but if only 48,000 babies are being born, that figure would be quite significant—it would be about 27 or 28 per cent of the total. The net figure for the number of people who left Scotland in the 50 years before devolution was 2 million, but we had a much higher birth rate then. That is why the population remained static. It is only because the birth rate has fallen so significantly that we have this situation. If we still had the out-migration that we had then, we would be in real bother.

At paragraph 5.14 of the report, you say:

“The bulk of the sustainability risk is with the UK Government”.

At paragraph 5.15, you say that, in that scenario,

“the UK Government would have a deficit in its primary balance for almost all years of the projection. The deficit would gradually grow, reaching 11 per cent of GDP by 2071-72.”

The UK Government will clearly have to take corrective action, which will obviously impact on Scotland.

In paragraph 2.8, on page 16, you say that Scotland has a “projected net annual inflow” of about 19,000 people and that about 9,000 of those people will be from the rest of the UK. Over the months and years, I have said that a lot of the people who leave Scotland tend to be highly productive and educated people in their 20s and 30s and that a lot of the people who come from the UK retire to Argyll and Bute or to Arran, in my constituency, where they have a nice view over the Clyde to Skelmorlie and West Kilbride.

Overall economic performance will be impacted not just by the number of migrants. That goes back to the OECD’s point about intergenerational differences. Do you intend to take such issues into account more in the future?

Thanks very much for that. I certainly feel that the committee has a role to challenge, certainly in our scrutiny function, so that is very much something that I would agree with.

I do not know how in-depth your individual experiences are but, in your experience of the civil service, do civil servants feel that they can challenge ministers? Clearly, individual relationships make a huge difference, and there will be different personalities and leadership styles. We are not trying to say that people should be in a certain box. Do you think that there is an ability to talk truth to power? Do you think that it is limited? Do you think that there should be more of that? What is the relationship of civil servants with that?

I call Douglas Lumsden, to be followed by Liz Smith.

James Black, the Scottish Government interacts with a lot of organisations outside the Scottish Parliament. From speaking to a former minister, I understand that there is a sense of great weariness among some of those organisations that they are consulted almost to death but do not necessarily see the Government taking forward what they want within the timeframe they are asking for. That weariness perhaps comes from feeling a lack of real participation. Is that something that you have found? How can it be improved?

Do you think that, when the Scottish Government communicates with organisations that are looking for funding, it does so in as straightforward manner as it should? For example, one of my constituency organisations had a significant funding bid turned down and, when it asked why, it was told that the fund was heavily oversubscribed. That might have been true, but does that mean that the application was excellent but others were better? Was it just a poor application, or would it not have been an effective use of resources? It seems that organisations are not really told that. They might be told it on some occasions, but certainly on that occasion the organisation was not really told why it did not get the funding other than the fact that that was the size of the pot, this was the number of bids, and it was just not among the lucky ones that were selected. Do you think that such feedback could be improved?

Do you not think that the national performance framework has a role to play in that?