Meeting of the Parliament 10 March 2016
I am happy to speak in today’s debate. I very much welcome the fact that we have a Fiscal Commission in place. We are now going to have a strengthened Fiscal Commission that will, through the bill, be put on a statutory footing. As other members have said, we have spent a fair bit of time in the Finance Committee examining and discussing such commissions and how they work; we were also the lead committee for the bill.
Although Scotland aspires to be an independent country at some point, with all the extra powers and responsibilities that that would involve, we are clearly not at that point yet. Internationally, there are not that many examples of devolved administrations, or states in federal systems, that have their own independent fiscal institutions. Some of the states in the USA do, Ontario does, and Catalonia does, but not many others do. We have tended to look at smaller independent countries for models. Some of the committee visited Sweden and a couple of us went to Ireland.
Scotland has the opportunity to set an example and to lead the way for devolved Governments and Parliaments, with the commission. As we studied more international examples, and as we thought through how a commission would work, I became increasingly convinced that the normal international model of an independent commission commenting on or endorsing forecasts is the best model. That is the norm internationally; the UK model is an exception. In that respect, I agreed with the Scottish Government and disagreed with the majority of the committee. In fact, the commission’s members were not convinced by the OBR model, either. I must say that I have a great respect for all three commission members, and I hope that they will be willing to take on a role that is different to the one that they had expected. However, as part of the negotiations over the fiscal framework, I accept that Westminster was keen to have us adopt its OBR model and I accept that the Scottish Government agreed to that as part of the bargaining process. That was the main area of disagreement at committee.
Mention has already been made of one amendment today. I must say that there was a bit of tokenism going on: Labour, as the Opposition, in fighting off the Tories, was trying to show that there was something that it must oppose. It hunted through the bill, found a little thing and created an amendment on it.