Meeting of the Parliament 14 January 2016
Indeed I have, and if the minister had read the previous report he would know that the commission keeps asking for information about behavioural forecasting in relation to LBTT and has yet to receive that information. I invite him to read last year’s report and this year’s report, and then come to a conclusion about what is going on.
Forecasting is not an exact science—I wish that it were—so there will be differences in approach, but we should not be afraid to test them to arrive at the best. Governance arrangements also matter for the perceived independence of the Fiscal Commission, so the mechanism for appointment needs to command confidence. There must never be a circumstance in which a commissioner acts as an adviser to the Government, as that would conflict directly with the commissioner’s role as scrutineer. That needs to be made crystal clear.
Forecasting is not separate from the discussion about independence. The Finance Committee took a considerable volume of evidence on that point, both in its original work on Scotland’s fiscal framework and in its scrutiny of the bill. Many witnesses expressed a clear wish that the commission should undertake forecasting. There was a strong level of support for that among experts in the field, including from many notable economists and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.