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No. It is just about the impact on the Scottish budget of every additional £1 in hourly pay.

And the good news is: no new website on the way.

If you had not done that, there would have been very severe impacts on the budget.

In the draft budget, the Scottish Government’s priorities were re-emphasised. You mentioned those priorities earlier: ending child poverty, ensuring sustainable public services and accelerating the transition to net zero. What happened to the commitment to sustainable economic growth, which is necessary to pay for all that? There was no mention of it in the budget statement. The draft budget document suggests as a national outcome that

“We have a globally competitive, entrepreneurial, inclusive and sustainable economy”,

but there is no detail on how that will be achieved.

Thanks to the economic turmoil that was exacerbated by the UK Government’s disastrous decisions in the autumn, the UK is now in recession, so how can the Scottish Government sustain rapidly rising benefits that will be £1.4 billion higher than they would have been if they had not been devolved with a shrinking economy, a fall in the working-age population and low productivity growth?

The Scottish child payment has had a phenomenally positive impact on the 400,000 children whose parents are receiving it; it has made a significant difference. The whole point of having anti-poverty strategies is that people are eventually lifted out of poverty, and I know that, next year, the Scottish Government will spend more on employability than it originally intended to. If we are going to spend more on anti-poverty measures, by what year does the Scottish Government expect the work to lower child poverty to succeed to the extent that welfare expenditure will begin to decline?

Thank you. I now open up the session, and the first person to ask a question will be Douglas Lumsden.

Last but not least, John Mason.

Thank you—that was very helpful. I will start off the questions, but I ask colleagues to direct all their questions to Jackson, and he will decide whether to answer them or to take the fifth and palm them off to one of his colleagues.

I will start near the end of your remarks and ask about the commissioners’ and Scottish Public Services Ombudsman bids. As you highlighted, those involve quite a significant increase. The money that is being spent on the commissioners and the ombudsman is now £3 million more than it is for MSPs. While the increase in the budget for MSPs’ pay is £17,000, as you pointed out, the increase for the office-holders is about £1.2 million.

You talked about the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland, the budget for which has increased by 40.5 per cent, and you mentioned a section 22 order. On salaries alone, the £463,000 increase is equivalent to 7.4 full-time positions, which is an average of £55,000 for each of those positions. Therefore, will you explain to us the necessity of that because, on paper, particularly at a time of financial challenge, it looks like a very significant increase?

There have been many positive comments about the work that you are doing. I asked the question because I am trying to put information about the allocation of money on the public record. Will there be a reduction in the scrutiny of Brexit? We are now three years into that. There must surely be a change to the scrutiny now. Is that winding up, or is there more work still to do? Is it on the same level? Where are we with that?

I would agree with everything that you said. It is important that there has been an explanation of that. I still think that a system that is a year behind—whether we benefit or not—is odd, because that is not reflected anywhere else in the public sector. I do not think that anyone on the committee would suggest that, at a time when everybody else is taking below-inflation pay rises, we should not do the same. Of course, the system has to be independent.

I ask that question because MSP colleagues will talk about the matter privately, but they will no want to do that publicly. Frankly, that in itself is an issue, because everybody else feels more than happy to talk about their pay and conditions, regardless of where they work.

That explanation is important and helpful. The weakness with ASHE is not that it is an independent system but that it does not take into account our actual situation as it is, whether it is good, bad or indifferent. As I said, all that will happen is that, because it is a year behind, it will look bad when the rate is above CPI, just as it will look odd when it is below CPI. It is a rather bizarre system.