Seòmar agus comataidhean

We will now take evidence from the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth on a Scottish statutory instrument.

Mr Arthur is joined by Robert Souter, senior tax policy adviser at the Scottish Government. I welcome Mr Souter to the meeting, and I invite Mr Arthur to make a short opening statement.

Thank you. I do not have any questions, and I see that there are none from committee members. I am sure that you are relieved that there were no questions on that. I could have asked one or two for the sake of it, but why would one do that?

Thank you for your evidence, minister.

The next item on our agenda is formal consideration of motion S6M-08009. I invite the minister to move the motion.

Motion moved,

That the Finance and Public Administration Committee recommends that the Scottish Landfill Tax (Standard Rate and Lower Rate) Order 2023 (SSI 2023/50) be approved.—[Tom Arthur]

Motion agreed to.

It seems to me a huge sum of money to have been added in the revisions, as opposed to something that was anticipated. For example, on teachers’ pensions, you know how many teachers will retire and how much they will get paid as part of their pension. It seems to me that £500 million is quite a differential.

I call John Mason. John, I do not want you to take more than an hour—I know that this is an exciting day for you.

I have annex A in front of me and I am trying to get some of those figures on the record, because that is public money and it is important that anybody who is watching this meeting or looking at the document has an idea about what is going on behind some of the figures. I am sure that you will accept that the document is a tome, and the amount of money that is switching from budget to budget is quite bewildering at times, so it is very difficult to get a steer on exactly why decisions have been made in the way that they have.

We are talking about the second in-year revision and yet some of the figures are very significant indeed. If we add them all up, we are talking about billions of pounds going from portfolio to portfolio, and it seems quite odd that such huge amounts of money are switching in year. This was an exceptional year, and we know all about the challenges that the Scottish Government has faced, but the amount of money that is moving from portfolio to portfolio—and, no doubt, within portfolios—seems quite astonishing.

This is meat and drink to John Mason. He always gets very excited—the spring budget revision is a highlight of his year.

Most of us on the committee have a grasp of such matters, but as you said, there is a need for clarity, so that anyone who looks at these figures can see what the thinking is behind the Scottish Government’s decisions and what the impact might be on front-line services. When people see a statement such as, “The figure for that is £X million, but it will not affect anything,” people think, “Whit?” It simply doesnae compute for ordinary people who are not as au fait with the process.

I have droned on long enough, so I will bring in colleagues around the table. The first member to ask questions will be Liz Smith.

Is one of the reasons also because, when the original budgetary lines are set, there is an overestimation of what will be spent in some of those portfolios? For example, in the net zero, energy and transport portfolio, £60.5 million of funding has been returned, which reflects

“lower than anticipated uptake from both private sector and local authority partners.”

If we look at social security, there is £62.1 million of funding reductions for those benefits, which have seen forecasts decrease. There is also a £58.2 million reduction in housing and respective capital grants to the private sector, and a £16.9 million release from concessionary fares and bus services because of lower than forecast uptake.

Those are significant sums of money in themselves, and certainly in total. It looks as if the Scottish Government has overshot itself in terms of what it anticipates will be spent within those portfolios. One could argue that that means that other portfolios might be more stretched at the start of the year, because money has gone into portfolios where the demand is significantly lower than anticipated. How is that being looked at to ensure that we get much more accurate projections?

Okay. One of the issues is technical adjustments. It is funny how the finance update says:

“technical changes … are essentially budget neutral and do not provide additional spending power for, or detriment to, the Scottish Government.”

The figure for technical changes is £130.6 million, so I wonder how it finds itself in the total expenditure for the year if it is neutral. Will you explain that a wee bit more?

You say that it is a technical thing, but that does not explain what it means in the real world.

Any information that can be provided to the committee will be helpful. We will be going through this process twice a year, so the more au fait we become with it, the better that will be for the committee and our relationship with the Scottish Government.