Meeting of the Parliament 07 October 2015
I am grateful for that.
I have to say that the Scottish Fiscal Commission Bill that the Scottish Government has put forward is disappointing and a bit toothless. The commission needs a wider and deeper role, and the key issue, on which the Finance Committee made a unanimous recommendation, is that the commission should produce its own forecasts. Nobody dissented from that recommendation. We have had evidence from around the planet that that is what happens in almost every country. The Scottish Government has not been able to provide any examples of countries in which only the official Government forecast is looked at and only it is used to decide whether the Government’s fiscal predictions are likely to be accurate.
I know that the Deputy First Minister has staked his position on the issue, but I simply ask him to look at the evidence and at what the experts have said. I genuinely think that the Scottish Government has taken the wrong approach on that one. I make a plea to him to be open minded as the bill goes through and change the provisions so that we can have independent forecasts, which will give us a much greater chance of getting it right.
A lot is at stake—we could be out by tens of millions or hundreds of millions of pounds. The chances of getting it right are increased enormously by having a system of checks and balances and by having independent experts who have access to their own forecasts. There would be much more possibility of getting it right than if we relied simply on Government forecasts.