Hansard

The motion that is before us asks us to note

“the revised written agreement on the budget process between the Scottish Government and the Finance Committee”.

The Conservatives will certainly do that now and at decision time.

The Scotland Act 2012 brings some significant changes to the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Government and, most important, the budget process. We will have to look at the Scottish Government’s specific forecasts for the land and buildings transaction tax, which is a new tax, and for the landfill tax, which is more of a replacement tax. For the first time, we will have to seriously examine the rates and the bands for those taxes, which will have an impact on a number of companies, businesses and voters across Scotland.

We will have to consider carefully the Scottish fiscal commission report. It will, of course, report on those two devolved taxes, but it will also report—for the first time—on business rates. That will give us the opportunity to examine carefully the Government’s forecast for business rates.

We will also have to consider carefully the borrowing plans that are laid out by the Scottish Government and—this is extremely important—the block grant adjustment mechanism and the effect of that mechanism on the budget for the financial year ahead.

There is a huge amount of work for Parliament, and for the Finance Committee in particular, in considering this year’s budget and every budget after that.

It is worth dwelling on how we got here for the 2015-16 budget; it is a good example of a committee doing its job and challenging assertions that have been made by Government so that Parliament ends up in a better place. When the Government wrote to the Finance Committee, it suggested that the budget should be published by mid-November 2014, which would have given the Finance Committee about six weeks in which to scrutinise the Scottish budget. That would be a tough ask in any year, but when we add in all the elements that I referred to earlier—the landfill tax, LBTT, borrowing and block grant adjustment—we can see that it would have been unachievable for Parliament to have scrutinised the budget in that length of time.

The Finance Committee, in the guise of the convener, wrote to the Government saying very clearly that we did not think that mid-November was acceptable and that we could not see any reason why the budget could not be published as soon as possible after Parliament recommences after the referendum. Several months later, the Scottish Government responded, offering a compromise publication date of 30 October. Again, my view and the view of the committee was that that would not give Parliament enough time to scrutinise the 2015-16 budget—especially because of the complex issues that we would be considering for the first time. The committee wrote back, stressing that we did not think that 30 October was acceptable and saying that we could not see any reason why the Scottish Government would want to delay publication any longer than the first week or two after we come back following the referendum, and that it should certainly want to publish before the first part of the October recess.

Eventually, in March this year, the Scottish Government wrote back and accepted the committee’s recommendation. So, there were five items of correspondence over a four-month period. Ultimately, I think it is an example of the Finance Committee doing its job. We will get the best possible scrutiny of the budget, rather than what was proposed, which would have given us only a small number of weeks and was clearly not enough to do the job that we were being asked to do.