The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 1319 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
Absolutely. You mentioned 60 beds being removed. You are looking to reduce supplemental staffing support by half, which by my calculation would be 475 full-time equivalent positions. How can you do that without impacting on patient care, especially when waiting times are already increasing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
When is the next milestone? When will the OBR publish its next estimates?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
So it is 1 per cent per year—that is what I was trying to get at.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
Can organisations make such a change voluntarily, or does this go back to the point that Michelle Thomson, I think, made—that it would have to be mandated from the centre before we would get real reform among those organisations?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
How do we break that cycle? We hear from Government ministers that prevention and early intervention are key and are how we will make savings later, but I do not see a firm change to using the prevention model.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
My last question is around social security spend. We have seen that go up from about £3.6 billion in 2021-22, and it will be doubling by 2027-28. Behind that, there are two things. Inflation is obviously pushing the welfare bill up, but there are also new welfare commitments that are not matched, which do not come through in the block grant adjustment. How much is the spend on each of those? If we never had these new commitments, what would the social security bill be going forward?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
I guess, therefore, that it is not so much a case of divergence, because you are predicting that the two figures are coming closer again. A difference of 0.6 per cent does not sound like too much of a big number. If the OBR revised its figure up to 2.6 per cent growth and the two figures came together, what would that do to our income tax take, or to the BGAs?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
However, for the past five years, we have been lagging behind the earnings relative to the rest of the UK—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
So, looking forward, you do not have any estimates of the size of the public sector workforce.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 6 June 2023
Douglas Lumsden
I want to ask about shared services. Obviously, we have multiple health boards, 32 local authorities and the IJBs. Each has its own finance director, HR director and IT director. Is there scope in the public sector landscape to reduce the number of such roles and to consolidate into more of a shared-service model?