Hansard

I will begin on a positive note. The bill that we now have—the bill that I hope will pass at decision time today—is considerably better than the bill that was originally drafted. The bill as introduced had a number of flaws. First, it allowed only the Scottish Government to do the forecasts; it did not really encourage any alternative forecasts to be published, and the cabinet secretary made clear his view that there ought not to be any alternative forecasts.

The position was that the Scottish Fiscal Commission was simply to assess the “reasonableness” of the Scottish Government forecasts. In looking through that over the course of the budget process, I note that the reasonableness test was such a low bar that it was difficult to foresee a situation where the commission would do anything other than pass the Government’s forecasts as reasonable. When quizzed on whether it could suggest any numbers at all that would be deemed to be unreasonable, the commission was unable to say so. It stated bluntly that it did not look at the numbers. It did not look at the outputs at all; it looked at the models underpinning those numbers.

I hugely welcome the amendments that were passed in group 1 earlier today. They were fundamental. I genuinely think that, without them, we would not have had a Fiscal Commission worthy of the name. Without them, we would have had a series of educated, useful, intelligent advisers who would make the budget process better than it would be without them but would be nowhere close to being what is known internationally as an independent fiscal institution. That change to the bill rescued the commission from being something that would still have been a little helpful, perhaps, but would have been of almost no real regard in terms of scrutiny, particularly concerning the powers that will be introduced in the years to come. That makes a huge improvement and, for that reason, we will continue to support the bill and will vote for it at stage 3.

However, having worked on the matter for well over two years now, I have to say that I am left with a bit of a feeling of dissatisfaction at the end of the process, for a number of the reasons that Jackie Baillie outlined in her speech. I guess that I have been working on the Finance Committee for a couple of years extra as it has taken into account a huge amount of evidence over the course of the process.

I am disappointed that we do not have an amendment to ensure that the commission addresses the sustainability of the finances and the adherence to the fiscal rules. That seems to happen throughout the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. We have looked at the materials from the Scottish Parliament information centre, which got a document from the OECD, and we have been examining practice in 17 countries. All 17 of them consider at least one or the other. All 17 consider the long-term sustainability or the monitoring of fiscal rules, and nine of the 17 do both. The fact that we will do neither here makes us a bit of an outlier.

I was dissatisfied, too, with the Finance Committee at stage 2. I will return to that in closing. In attempting to be helpful by answering a question from me, the cabinet secretary has just opened up more questions. At stage 1, we all agreed in relation to fiscal rules, without anyone going away from it, and we all thought that that was the way we had to go. We had held that position for well over a year. Then, all of a sudden, at stage 2, four members of the Finance Committee voted against the relevant amendment, which failed. If the cabinet secretary did not attempt to put any pressure on those committee members at all, and if confidentiality was maintained—I have no reason whatever to doubt that—what was it that made those members change their minds? What was the intervening evidence between the report being published in the middle of January and the vote being taken in early February that made them vote the way that they did? As a committee member and a member of the Parliament, I think that we are entitled to an explanation of why that was the case. I hope that we get that over the course of the debate.