Chamber and committees

We will move on from that. You have raised really interesting points. I will certainly take them up with other people.

There is a 6.7 per cent increase in the general staffing budget. You have explained some of that, but the SPCB’s submission says:

“Staff pay including use of contractors is budgeted at £37.3m, a net increase of £2.3m … in cash terms”.

What is the breakdown between contractors and our own staff?

What developments do you expect from that to enhance public engagement? If you are employing three staff to enhance public engagement, what improvements in it do you envisage?

It is okay—that is a sound explanation. I should have thought of the national insurance issue, because you mention it in the document in relation to the overall budget. Thank you for explaining that.

I am going to ask about the annual survey of hours and earnings—the ASHE index. Given that the GDP deflator is 3.2 per cent, and consumer prices index inflation is 10 or 11 per cent, how do you arrive at that ASHE figure? I take it that it is about a year out of date. Is that right?

What is the point in that? No one would say to any other group of workers—including in the Scottish Parliament—that they were just going to use the inflation rate as it was in late 2021 for calculating pay. How has that figure been calculated and why has that approach been adopted? Who was consulted on that? It seems an anomaly.

The letter says, with regard to staff provision, that

“Based on the recent ASHE publication this derived an index of 4.1%”.

However, recognising current inflation figures, the SPCB has opted to use only the average weekly earnings index of 5.6 per cent in order to uplift the general staff provision for members. Why is that not being used for MSPs but it is being used for everyone else? You said that there was no virtue signalling, but it is clear that there is.

I add another point. If the ASHE index says that because inflation is 11 per cent—although by the same time next year inflation might be 3 or 4 per cent, or possibly even lower—MSPs should get a 5 or 6 per cent pay rise, we will just end up with lots of headlines about it being an inflation-busting pay rise, which, by that time, no one else in the public sector will be getting. That seems daft to me from a public relations or practical point of view—or indeed any point of view.

We continue our evidence taking on the Scottish budget 2023-24. I welcome to the meeting John Swinney, the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery. He is joined by the Scottish Government officials Alison Cumming, director of budget and public spending; Gary Gillespie, chief economist; and Andrew Scott, director of tax and revenues.

We have around 90 minutes for this session. Before I open the discussion, I wish Mr Swinney and his colleagues a happy new year, and I invite him to make an opening statement.

Colleagues might want to examine the net impact of that, but I will focus on what that tax will be used for. There are Barnett consequentials for health. In addition to those, how much additional resource is going into the national health service, for example?

Through fiscal drag, raising taxes impacts adversely on living standards, and it is anticipated that living standards across the UK will fall by 7.1 per cent over the next two years.

On St Andrew’s day, I was privileged to attend the official opening of the £88 million medicines manufacturing innovation centre in Inchinnan, which is a world-leading facility that has in part been made possible through Scottish Government investment. Given such examples, is it not time to focus more of the Scottish Government’s limited financial resources on boosting tech scalers—I know that there is an element of that in the budget, which I asked about after your budget statement, as you know—start-ups, research and development, innovation, skills and infrastructure in order to create high-value jobs, drive up private sector confidence in investment, attract people of working age—not just retirees—from across the UK and beyond to Scotland, and deliver the tax revenue that is needed to pay for the public services that we require?

On sustainability, in evidence to the committee, Professor Ruane said:

“It is about optimising the use of digital technologies to be efficient in the delivery of public services”.—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 20 December 2022; c 4.]

However, there is a concern that details of public sector reforms, which were expected along with the budget, will now be set out in due course. When is that likely to be?

I appreciate that.

I take on board what you are saying, but at the time of the resource spending review last May, we were advised that a package of reforms would be presented with the budget, and that has not happened. Now, it is being presented as a kind of on-going situation—almost a mañana approach. That is how it seems. The committee would prefer that, when we are told that something will happen in eight months’ time, it actually happens in eight months. If that is not possible—I realise that there has been huge turmoil in the past year—we should be told that you have not been able to present the package of reforms by the time of the budget but that you will do that in March, May or whenever. It seems that we are now being presented with almost a rolling reform thing, which it is difficult to get a grip of. It is hard for us to grasp it fully and to scrutinise and analyse it.