Meeting of the Parliament 10 March 2016
I welcome the opportunity to debate Jackie Baillie’s amendment, which, as she and Gavin Brown indicated, was debated at stage 2 in a different form, although the principle was largely similar.
I remain unclear of the added value or enhanced scrutiny that would be provided by way of the commission assessing Scottish ministers’ performance against fiscal rules. The Scottish Government is subject to budgetary rules, which Jackie Baillie includes in her definition of fiscal rules, and performance against them is already effectively assessed by the Auditor General as part of the annual audit of the Scottish Government’s annual financial statements. We are also subject to statutory aggregate borrowing limits and annual borrowing limits that are set administratively by the United Kingdom Government. There are already established mechanisms for reporting to Parliament on those issues. Whether the Scottish Government operates within the limits is a matter of fact, so it remains unclear what public value the commission could add in carrying out assessments against the limits.
Should the Scottish Government gain borrowing flexibilities that would enable us to set further, more flexible fiscal rules, I would suggest that we revisit the issue and consider whether the commission could add value in reporting on the Government’s adherence to such rules.
On the analysis of fiscal sustainability, I remain of the view that that is primarily a role for elected members of the Scottish Parliament, who hold ministers directly to account for the robustness of our financial judgments.