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Professor Heald, in the evidence that you have given today and in your submission, you have mentioned super-parity policies—which I will call “more generous policies”, in layman’s terms—and you raised that issue previously. On 8 March 2022, you said:

“This is the time when Scotland should take stock of where it is. One thing that I would like to see in the spending review is serious data on what the future spend on the above-parity programmes will be in the next five or 10 years.”—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 8 March 2022; c 5.]

However, you are here again, more than two years later, making the point about the gap around our more generous programmes and our lack of understanding of it. Is sufficient planning on understanding that gap and being able to express the difference so that we can plan for the future, even in the medium term, taking place?

With regard to place-based opportunities and economic development in the Highlands, for instance, are there plans or strategies that will be able to deliver those kinds of jobs?

It is incredibly difficult for us as parliamentarians to judge the variance with the initial budget and whether the Government has made a mess of the whole situation with the governance of public pay when we do not know, you do not know and, as they have said, the Fraser of Allander Institute and the Institute for Fiscal Studies do not know what the assumptions on public pay were in the budget. There has been no attempt from the Government to give you any clarity. I understand that you are not going to make revisions on the basis of those assumptions, but you have had no conversation in which the Government has said, “The global figure that we reached in our budget was based on this figure.”

No such scenario planning was set out. Nothing about contingencies was expressed to you.

That is a huge issue, given that we hear that pay is the single biggest pressure that we face.

I will move quickly on to social security payments. The report that you submitted to us showed that there was a very big spike after the allocation of adult disability payments in comparison with the awards for personal independence payments across the UK. That gap seems to have closed quite substantially in relation to the new awards that have been made. Are you confident about that data? Does it feel real? In relation to applications, has there been a short-term behaviour change?

When I raised the issue with the finance secretary at the committee in January, she said:

“it would not be right”—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 16 January 2024; c 35.]

to publish such a policy. Surely it could not be anything other than right to publish such a policy. You need it.

However, we do not know whether the pay policy that was published in May matches the assumptions that were made in the 2024-25 budget.

That is all that you have had.

That is comprehensive. Thank you.

All the coverage on transparency is key, particularly given what we are expecting this afternoon—hundreds of millions of pounds of cuts, with many people’s livelihoods on the line. Do we know yet what the assumptions that the Government made on pay in the 2024-25 budget actually were?