Chamber and committees

I will ask one last question. Colleagues are, understandably, keen to come in.

On this issue, you have said:

“There is a need to examine ways in which the costs of inquiries can be contained without being seen to compromise independence. Could inquiries be expected to work to set budgets and timetables as opposed to the somewhat open ended arrangements which pertain at present and which too often result in escalating costs.”

Surely, they should be expected to do that. I cannot think of any other area of government where there is an open-ended timescale or budget. We do not set a capital contract and say, “Just take as long as you like and spend as much as you want.” That is not said explicitly to inquiries, but it is almost said implicitly. No one says it, but that is almost the way it appears to be when one considers how inquiries are rolled out.

In the Vale of Leven inquiry, for example, the health secretary at the time said that they were looking for a report within 15 months. The judge said, “We’ll do it as soon as possible,” but that turned out to be five years. Do you believe that there should be parameters for costs and timescales, as there are in any other area of the public sector?

I call Liz Smith, to be followed by Craig Hoy.

I should point out that New Zealand’s Covid investigation is a royal commission. It is chaired by an epidemiologist, and the panel is made up of a former Government minister and a treasury secretary rather than a judge. Its deadline for concluding is next February.

I call Michael Marra.

Liz, did you want to come in?

I have given you a lot of leeway, but you know what we are discussing today.

Liz, I think that you should rescind your retirement in order to progress that in the next parliamentary session.

Private companies do it all the time. If you have a budget of £64 billion, even if 1 per cent of that has not been allocated efficiently, that is a lot of money. It is about going back to first principles and asking what we are trying to achieve from the spend and whether we are achieving it. That is really about it.

Yes, I do not think that we are pushing at an open door here, to be honest with you. Nevertheless, we shall certainly valiantly pursue our aims.

Thank you, Professor Cameron, for your very helpful contribution, for taking the time to speak to the committee and for your excellent submission. We will continue to take evidence on the inquiry next week, when we will hear from two panels of witnesses.

That concludes the public part of our meeting. The next item on our agenda, which we will discuss in private, is consideration of our work programme.

I will touch on the subject of your letter and the MTFS shortly, but will begin with other areas that we deliberated on in our report.

You rightly spoke about the improvements in budget transparency that the Scottish Government has delivered in recent years, not least the improvement in the quality of the spring and autumn budget revisions, but there are still some areas where I think that the Government could continue those improvements.

For example, more transparency and consistency of presentation is required, particularly in relation to in-year transfers. On a number of occasions, I have raised with ministers the fact that we see the same sums of money being transferred from the same portfolios to others every single year when it seems to me to be nonsensical that those sums are not already in the portfolios to which they are later transferred. I think that there is politics behind that because of the portfolios concerned and because people might say that money is being cut from one budget and put into another. I understand that, but if that is the case, the Government should be clear and frank about it because it is nonsensical that we keep seeing that.

Over the years, I have also raised the issue of public-private partnership sums. In the past couple of years, I have raised the fact that, if memory serves me right, although there was £133 million of PPP payments in the trunk roads budget, that money does not appear anywhere else to any degree. The committee is looking for a budget that is much clearer and more transparent and that will aid the public, stakeholders and anyone else who takes an interest.

Finally on transparency, I am sure that you would agree that more detailed information on pay and workforce is required, given the huge proportion of the overall budget that goes on that.

It is about inconsistency. You are right to hit on the Scottish child payment; a lot has been said about that. If outcomes can be tied to priorities, it is a lot easier for us and others to scrutinise where the Government is meeting the priorities that it has set for itself. It is a good discipline for the Government to see that its allocation of resources is doing exactly what it says on the tin.

Another issue that has been raised—the committee saw this when we were talking to Government officials in Estonia—is zero-based budgeting. That is about having a refresh every decade or so to ask, “Why are we doing this? Is it because we have always done it?” The value of that is to ensure that we get better bang for the buck. Is that something that the Government would consider?