Meeting of the Parliament 14 January 2016
I, too, thank the clerks, witnesses, experts and SPICe for all their efforts in helping us to scrutinise the bill. I express personal gratitude—at the risk of hindering his career—to the convener, Kenneth Gibson, who in my opinion has shown personal leadership on this particular issue.
We welcome the formation of the Scottish Fiscal Commission. It is critical that we have such a commission, and it will become more critical with each year that passes, which is why it is so vital that we get it right first time round. The bill as it stands is inadequate and does little but put into statute the Fiscal Commission that we currently have. That will not be enough for next year and will be nowhere near adequate for future years.
I will focus on the most glaring weaknesses in the bill. First, the Fiscal Commission has been given the job of simply assessing the reasonableness of the Scottish ministers’ forecasts. That is all: it must assess the reasonableness and, ultimately, decide whether the forecasts are reasonable or not. Most of the experts who were asked about that made it very clear that being reasonable is an extremely low threshold, and it is difficult to find examples of circumstances in which forecasts would be unreasonable.
Indeed, that was confirmed last week when we spoke to the Fiscal Commission. I asked it whether, given that the prediction for the amount from the devolved taxes next year is £671 million, it could tell me approximately what sort of number below and above that figure would mean that a forecast could be classed as being unreasonable. The Fiscal Commission told me that it was impossible to do that. So, in the current format, it is impossible for the Fiscal Commission, which consists of extremely gifted and experienced individuals, to tell me what would be an unreasonable number in that regard.