Chamber and committees

I will do my best, but I may rely on my officials.

I think that I am right in saying that the biggest of those adjustments relates to student loans. That is dealt with at a UK level, and there has been a reassessment of how the risk—for want of a better word—is categorised in relation to those loans. As a consequence, some technical adjustments have been made. Those apply across the UK, and the implications for our budget are around £3 billion. However, as I said, it makes no difference to the amount of money that we have to spend. As you know, because we do not have tuition fees in Scotland, our student loan position is very different from that of the rest of the UK. It is a technical adjustment based on the risk profile that is covered by the UK Government. In any event, it does not impact our day-to-day spending in any way.

We do not give up hope, and we will continue to press on that.

I do not know what the Prime Minister discussed with the President, but I imagine that it was not just chit-chat and that international affairs were mentioned.

That goes back to the on-going conversations that the committee is having with the Scottish Public Pensions Agency. I understand that Dr Pathirana will be appearing before you again shortly. As you know, I am working very closely with the SPPA. I have regular calls with the agency and have visited it. We have put in additional funding to support its asks for additional resources. An extensive amount of automation is being undertaken to speed up the process.

We know from the history of the issue that the original timelines were unrealistic, given that clarification from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs on the tax treatment of the calculations was received very late in the day. There were other challenges, too.

In effect, that is an allocation from the UK Government in anticipation of what payments it was thought would have been made in that financial year. That did not happen, because the SPPA—along with all the other public sector pension providers across the UK—is not where it would want to be with regard to making those payments.

I do not know who wants to explain the ins and outs of that to Mr Mason, accountant to accountant.

I do not know the detail of that. Decisions to deploy advertising to publicize the availability of benefits were made within Social Security Scotland and the relevant portfolio. To go back to a point that the convener made, uptake depends on a number of factors; however, if people are not aware that they are entitled to benefits, it is clearly a role of the Government and its agencies to make them aware. I can take a look at whether there is any analysis on the specifics of how that might drive uptake and how that is quantified, and come back.

As I said, there are a number of factors. With the transition of the benefit, there will be one pool of people who have been through various processes—in the UK context, obviously—and there will new applicants coming through who will not have been through that process or been assessed by Social Security Scotland under its mechanism. I am not close to the detail on that, but I would expect it to continually reassess its processes to ensure that they are appropriate.

You have to remember that that is one part of a suite of things that are happening. It is the first time that we have undertaken that novel approach. We focused on tackling a specific problem: reducing costs in one part of the system in a different financial year when the cost is included in another part of the system in the current financial year.

Clearly, in the normal run of events, there is no incentive for the portfolio that is seeking to make that expenditure to spend it out of the current year’s budget when someone else gets the benefit in several years’ time. We designed the system to cope with that. We invited applications from multiple portfolios to work together, and there is a clawback mechanism whereby a proportion of the fund comes back in future years, based on the assessment of the savings that they make in the other portfolios.

I will be honest with you—we did not know how that was going to work. We have had some uptake, which is good, and a number of very successful projects. We pitched a number of proposals where we thought they might land. However, because it is quite a different way of budgeting and deploying resources, portfolios are working at pace to get their heads round how they engage with the process. It would have been good had there been more take-up, but that tells us that we have more work to do to get people to focus on preventative opportunities, because they did not previously have a mechanism to resolve that.

I would expect that that is because more people are using the service. If I am not mistaken, operators make a claim on the funding based on usage. I can double-check that. However, if that is an indication of more people who are eligible for concessionary travel travelling more on buses, I suppose that I would say that that would be a positive thing. I can check the specifics on that for you.

I do not have any information on the smaller number—the £1 million or so. The bigger number comes back to the point that Mr Hoy made about the invest-to-save scheme. As I said earlier in relation to the uptake of the £30 million scheme, it is only one part of what is happening. It is tackling a specific challenge of portfolios perhaps not taking up opportunities because of the way in which the budget process has traditionally worked. The scheme is a mechanism to alleviate that problem. Because it is a different way of doing business, it is not necessarily something that the portfolios would have been looking for, and so it was perhaps always going to be a bit of a challenge to get everything right in the first year.