Seòmar agus comataidhean

I will not have time to touch on reform or transparency in capital spending, and I am not going to touch on enterprise, although I point out that the £1,334 million additional spend on welfare is exactly the same as the total budget allocated to the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Gaelic, as is set out on page 78 of the budget.

My last question is about national insurance. The draft budget does not take into account the £549 million cost of national insurance increases in the public sector, the £210 million impact on the third sector and independent care homes or, indeed, the £49 million cost for universities. Has the UK Government confirmed how much it will allocate to the Scottish Government to cover those costs? How will that money be disbursed?

It would be helpful to see why some projects were prioritised and some were not. It would be good to have more specifics on those. For example, among the projects to be funded are net zero-ready projects worth £926,000. That figure includes £736,000 on a building environmental management system and £190,000 on net zero consultancy. It would be good to see what those projects will actually deliver. At the moment, we just have a list of projects that does not necessarily say what they are going to do. I am not looking for “War and Peace”, but a sentence or two to give the specifics on that would probably be very helpful.

For the second part of the evidence session on the Scottish budget 2025-26, I welcome to the meeting Shona Robison, Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, who is joined by Scottish Government officials Jennie Barugh, director of exchequer strategy; Richard McCallum, director of public spending; Ellen Leaver, acting director for local government; and Lorraine King, deputy director, tax strategy, engagement and performance.

Given the time constraints, we will dispense with an opening statement. I will start the session with a number of questions.

There is a lot in the draft budget that stakeholders will be pleased with. Health and social care spending is up 9.8 per cent, ferry services by 22.7 per cent and housing by a whopping 57 per cent. Justice and local government have significant increases in resource relative to last year, budget to budget.

However, there is some confusion. Last year, this committee asked for the autumn budget revision numbers to be used as a baseline, but without making adjustments to strip out routine in-year transfers, because that makes it difficult for the committee to see clearly exactly what is going on. It would be good if that could be remedied for next year. Are there any plans to do that, to make scrutiny easier for the committee?

Regarding the lifting of the two-child cap, which the First Minister said will happen before 2026-27 if possible, the Scottish Fiscal Commission has said that funding will be awarded to the families of 43,000 children, at a cost of £155 million. That includes the administration costs of delivering the funding and equates to more than £3,600 per child, which is nearly £70 a week. Are those figures correct? It seems an awful lot.

What will be the impact on incentivising people to go back into work?

One could argue that a teacher, half of whose salary over £43,000 goes on tax and national insurance, might have to decide whether they can afford an extra child, because they do not have access to those additional funds. Many people who are in work resent that, which is why the policy is unpopular with the majority of voters, as all polls have shown. People who are working have to decide whether they can afford another child, and they see—rightly or wrongly—that people who are not working might be able to access benefits that they cannot in relation to deciding whether to expand their family.

That is absolutely fine—they were comprehensive. In fact, opening statements make life easier for the committee, because they answer some of the questions that we would probably have asked anyway. They also lead to other questions, the most obvious of which is why the £2 million for the Electoral Commission was not included in the indicative costs. It is pretty obvious that there is going to be an election next year, so it seems bizarre that the sum was not included in the indicative costs for 2025-26.

How much is that worth in the current year?

The new committee is looking at that, and it will have to address it as part of its remit.

I go back to the issue of AWE versus ASHE. I know that none of my MSP colleagues are dead keen to get involved in that particular issue, so I suppose, as convener, I will. It is heads we lose, tails we lose, is it not? When it came out, a couple of years ago, the ASHE index was about 1.7 per cent when inflation was 11 per cent. Jackson Carlaw, you had a twinkle in your eye when you said that it will probably reverse next year. It has not really reversed, and now it has gone the other way. MSP salaries have gone up by 12 per cent in the past five years, compared with inflation at 25 per cent. Was it just for public consumption reasons or for other, financial reasons that you decided to stick with AWE?

The staff pay increase in the forthcoming year is also based on the figure of 3.2 per cent, which means that it is difficult to have, for example, in-grade promotions for the advancement of staff members. Why has it been decided to abandon the ASHE-AWE combo for staff?