Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am happy to provide information on that. As you know, I am keen that we continue to focus on the contingent workforce as well as the total number of civil servants and the number of those on higher grades.

I am focused on both of those things. I have fortnightly calls in which I go through many charts, graphs and numbers and look at the matter in fine detail. In the current period, the controls are quite different.

It makes sense to hold it in the finance portfolio. As I said, we could make guesses about what might impact different portfolios and allocate accordingly, but that would not really help because, if it did not turn out that way for specific portfolios, we would be moving money back in and then moving it back out again. It makes more sense to hold the money centrally and to be able to allocate it, depending on what happens with the variations that I have outlined as they transpire and as we move towards the end of the year.

We would have had to be able to cover year-end audit adjustments. The demand-led programmes are what they are, and we need to cover them. The tax changes are what they are. None of the underlying numbers change, and we would have had to deal with them one way or another. All that we are doing is creating a mechanism that we believe gives us more flexibility to address costs.

I will ask officials to come in on the specifics of those lines in a minute, but, in general, with the social security budget lines for all the benefits, roughly half are higher than expected and half are lower than expected, so the numbers roughly balance out. From memory, the figure that we are talking about in total is just over £100 million out of a £6 billion budget, which is a 2 per cent variation.

You have to remember that we use forecasts of what we think the uptake will be of the demand-led benefits. Clearly, there will be variation in that as we move through, and work will be done to refine the forecasts. Obviously, many of the benefits are relatively new, so working through the data and getting more accurate forecasts as we go are important parts of that process. However, as I said, the figure is within 2 per cent of the overall budget, and you would expect some of those budget lines to go up and some to go down.

Yes. If you look back, it is an issue to do with the running costs of the SQA. I think that it would be true to say that it has happened in previous years as well. There is some work to be done to understand the cost profile and how much we are budgeting for that.

Yes—it is a huge range because there is a huge range of unknowns. Frankly, I do not know what planning you have taken part in, but we would always plan for contingencies. Those contingencies, depending on the extent of the consequentials that came through, may have involved the use of ScotWind money, the use of reserves and further restrictions on budgets, or they may not have. That is dependent not only on the UK Government consequentials, but on a range of other factors that we have talked about this morning, many of which run into the many hundreds of millions of pounds.

First of all, we will always get such adjustments at the level of specific benefits because, as I said, they are demand led and we will get variation—some will be up and some will be down. However, over the piece, those are almost balanced. As I said, many of those benefits are new, so, as we run those benefits for longer and we get more data, there will be more clarity and more accuracy on the forecast, although we will never get that exactly right.

Scott Mackay might want to comment on that specific issue.

I will defer to officials for the numbers in a minute.

International financial reporting standard 16 is about how leases and rentals are treated in relation to transfers from capital to resource. A change in the policy and in the regulation of their treatment is getting phased in over a three-year period, so we were required to submit an estimation of how that would phase in over those three years. Normally in that scenario, you would get flexibility—you would be able to move those numbers in year, depending on how the transfers and the projects themselves transpired. However, we were not given that flexibility, which means that we are having to flex from discretionary spending any variation from the forecast of how those transfers from capital to resource would take place to meet the new standard.

On the scale of the impact, I will pass to Scott.

Those are all good questions. If we were able to deliver a result for less money, I would be supportive of that. As I said, though, there is an independence involved in the operation of inquiries, and we need to be cognisant of that. The committee might wish to look further at the issue, but we are happy to provide whatever information we have on their operation.

I have seen the same thing with regard to estates. We are working hard to ensure that public bodies share estates, but inquiries are in a slightly different place because of the requirements with regard to the specific estates that they want to occupy.