Seòmar agus comataidhean

ScotWind is in place, and we have known about the extent of that—you are quoting something from nearly three years ago—for a while. It is not something that has just arrived, and we have grabbed and used it. Plans were made in the understanding that there were pressures that had to be dealt with and there were—

It is all a balance. It is about understanding what the various pressures are and working our way through it, so it is not an either/or situation. In the scenario that you paint, you would have to make cuts up front, which would damage public services at that point. You could make assumptions, such as on public sector pay, and then you could look back after a period of time and realise that your assumption on how much to cut was larger than what occurred in reality. I would then be sitting here and you would rightly ask why I cut hundreds of millions of pounds from the budget at the start, which caused public services to suffer. It is not just a question of turning that tap on again when the money flows through and it becomes clear—I note that we are sitting here in November and still do not have full clarity on what the consequentials are. Pushing that money out the door in the last few weeks of a financial year is the most inefficient way to spend public money.

It is really important that, as part of this process, you understand what the ranges are, because it is not an exact science—there are many variables. We talk about £600 million, of which only £188 million was cuts to specific services in the budget lines that we outlined. That is 0.3 per cent of the total budget. We are trying to land this on a sixpence—very small percentage variations can make a big difference, running into many hundreds of millions of pounds.

That is the process, and I think that it is the right process. Do we always get it absolutely right? Of course not, because there are things that we do not know and are outside our control. Should we have erred more on one side than the other? You can always say that with hindsight, but if we had erred the other way, you would rightly have been criticising us for doing that.

As I have indicated in my comments this morning, clarity is still being sought on some of the impacts of the UK autumn budget, particularly around national insurance contributions for the public sector. There are other variables that are still being worked through with HM Treasury. When there is more clarity, the cabinet secretary will review the extent of the consequentials and will indicate what the decisions are on how we take that forward.

The budget process and consideration of how much is allocated to portfolios is on-going. That is part of the discussions that the cabinet secretary and I are having with portfolio cabinet secretaries on what the budget should look like for next year. Ultimately, decisions will be made at Cabinet and then by the Parliament in due course as to what the allocations between portfolios look like. There is a well-established process for that.

We absolutely have an eye on what happens next year as we go through this year’s process. I explained the work that is done to manage the ranges and variables in bringing this year’s budget to balance, which obviously has implications, positive or negative, for spend in future years’ budgets, and that is absolutely considered as part of the process.

There would still be revisions and transfers, but they would involve smaller numbers, as you rightly point out. We will certainly give that due consideration.

I think that £1.4 billion was probably at the upper end of what we expected, but there was no guarantee that the number would not have been far less than that.

The broader context is that there was a significant capital spending reduction for this year. Although it looks as though that will be largely reversed as we go into next year, that is the context that we are working in, which, as we know, has put pressure on capital spending.

We do not seem to have any more information on the timing of specific projects. If you have information on that timeline, that is obviously what is happening; I will come back to you if there are any more specifics on the timing of the update.

That is a good question. This week and next, we are publishing more data on the exercise that we conducted over the summer on what public bodies and, indeed, the Scottish Government have spent on corporate functions in the broadest sense, internally and in relation to acquired services. This is the first time that the exercise has been done. The data, by necessity, is a couple of years out of date, because it is culled from annual published reports from more than 100 public bodies, but it is allowing us to accelerate our work in looking for savings in specific aspects of public spending, be that on estates, digital, shared services, procurement frameworks and a range of other areas in which we believe that, by having visibility on a more granular level, we can drive more efficient ways of spending money.

As I said, that programme is under way. That data will provide us with more levers and tools to accelerate that work. You are right that there is then a question about how that work translates into how this budget process looks. At a macro level, reductions in those areas would be reflected in the budget lines. You would see the same budget line delivering more or you would be getting the same from a smaller budget line, because you would be working more efficiently. That, of course, is the intention.

However, you are right that we need to develop a mechanism to provide more visibility on the progress in that area. Part of the issue is that the data is historical—it is a couple of years old. We are conscious of and are spending a bit of time thinking about making the link between that and what we are delivering in real time in relation to what that looks like in the updates.

You have to recognise that a significant amount of money is being spent on the net zero transition. However, you are right that, as the cabinet secretary and I have made clear, those ScotWind moneys have had to be used in the short term. In the absence of clarity on the consequentials from the UK autumn budget, it was necessary to use that to deal with inflation pressures on the health service and the pay awards that public service workers rightly deserved. Without using that money, it would not have been possible to deal with that at that time. Now that there is more clarity on the UK funding position, we are able to work towards reversing that use of ScotWind.

What was the alternative?