Chamber and committees

This is meat and drink to John Mason. He always gets very excited—the spring budget revision is a highlight of his year.

Most of us on the committee have a grasp of such matters, but as you said, there is a need for clarity, so that anyone who looks at these figures can see what the thinking is behind the Scottish Government’s decisions and what the impact might be on front-line services. When people see a statement such as, “The figure for that is £X million, but it will not affect anything,” people think, “Whit?” It simply doesnae compute for ordinary people who are not as au fait with the process.

I have droned on long enough, so I will bring in colleagues around the table. The first member to ask questions will be Liz Smith.

Is one of the reasons also because, when the original budgetary lines are set, there is an overestimation of what will be spent in some of those portfolios? For example, in the net zero, energy and transport portfolio, £60.5 million of funding has been returned, which reflects

“lower than anticipated uptake from both private sector and local authority partners.”

If we look at social security, there is £62.1 million of funding reductions for those benefits, which have seen forecasts decrease. There is also a £58.2 million reduction in housing and respective capital grants to the private sector, and a £16.9 million release from concessionary fares and bus services because of lower than forecast uptake.

Those are significant sums of money in themselves, and certainly in total. It looks as if the Scottish Government has overshot itself in terms of what it anticipates will be spent within those portfolios. One could argue that that means that other portfolios might be more stretched at the start of the year, because money has gone into portfolios where the demand is significantly lower than anticipated. How is that being looked at to ensure that we get much more accurate projections?

Okay. One of the issues is technical adjustments. It is funny how the finance update says:

“technical changes … are essentially budget neutral and do not provide additional spending power for, or detriment to, the Scottish Government.”

The figure for technical changes is £130.6 million, so I wonder how it finds itself in the total expenditure for the year if it is neutral. Will you explain that a wee bit more?

You say that it is a technical thing, but that does not explain what it means in the real world.

Any information that can be provided to the committee will be helpful. We will be going through this process twice a year, so the more au fait we become with it, the better that will be for the committee and our relationship with the Scottish Government.

Good morning, and welcome to the seventh meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. The first item on our agenda is an evidence session with the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth on the draft Budget (Scotland) Act 2022 Amendment (No 2) Regulations 2023. Tom Arthur is joined by Scottish Government officials Craig Maidment and Niall Caldwell. I welcome our witnesses and I invite Mr Arthur to make a short opening statement.

Thank you very much for that, minister, and I thank you for the supporting documents that have been provided, which are very helpful to the committee.

The money that we are talking about is, in total, £713.4 million, which is not an insignificant amount. As you said, £502.3 million is changes to reflect the deployment of available resources to portfolios. Can you talk us through one or two of those? There have been quite significant and substantial changes for the portfolios. In effect, some of those may just be rebranding, I would think—from one portfolio to another—but others might have more significant impacts. I want to talk through that, where possible.

First, for example, in health and social care, we have £422 million of positive funding changes, technical changes of £263.3 million, and net transfers within the Scottish bloc of £898.7 million. The final sum is around £80 million less than at the beginning of the financial year. I know that some of that has gone to local government. Will you explain the thinking behind why those changes have taken place during the year?

Where did the £502.3 million of additional funding come from to enable you to put that additional funding into the overall portfolio spread?

I am sure that other colleagues will ask about the fiscal framework, which is why I have not done so. However, the issue is one that the committee is becoming increasingly concerned about, because we do not seem to have moved forward on it in the past year. I know that there has been a lot of chaos, given that we have had four Chancellors of the Exchequer and three Prime Ministers.

Good morning and welcome to the fifth meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Today, we will consider the budget bill at stage 2, but before we turn to formal stage 2 proceedings, we will take evidence on the Scottish Government’s response to our “Budget Scrutiny 2023-24” report.

We are joined today by John Swinney, who is the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery. He is accompanied by Scottish Government officials Alison Cumming, who is the director of budget and public spending, and Lorraine King, who is the deputy director of the tax and revenues directorate. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting.

Members received copies of the Scottish Government response on Friday. Before we move to questions from the committee, I invite Mr Swinney to make a short opening statement.