Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thank you.

That is the point, though. You talked about the two areas where you can get additional money. The first is via the block grant, which presumably is either money that has been pre-promised from the UK Government through top-up funding from the UK budget or Barnett consequentials due to decisions that have been made in Westminster, or block grant asks of the UK Government, which are not guaranteed to be met—the two are very different. Alongside that sit revenue projections from tax intake under devolved taxation. What happens if neither of those increases or if there is no likelihood of them increasing? For example, early projections show that the tax increases announced in yesterday’s statement are less than £100 million, so it is nominal and nowhere near enough to scratch the surface of the spending commitments—the cash spend commitments. Surely the only other option would be for portfolio increases that happen in one area to require cuts in other areas. In other words, to balance the books, the money is just shuffled around from one set of portfolios to another. Either you have new money or you are just shuffling around existing money. It is very hard to determine which it is, and I guess that that is what I am struggling with.

You said in your last answer that the report highlights that social security spending will be £1.5 billion more due to devolved spending decisions, which again are policy decisions for policy makers. I understand that, and I am not asking for comment on the policy itself, but the facts are that they are spending more than they are getting in that portfolio. Presumably, that is unsustainable—the money must come from somewhere.

Just before I bring in Richard Robinson, I have to wonder whether we have a problem here. All the news headlines last night were about this particular policy, which I will not comment on the specifics of; however, despite all the focus on that policy announcement, we have since discovered that we do not know how much it will cost, if it is passed as part of the final budget and implemented. In fact, there is some dispute over those costs.

How can ministers stand up in Parliament or go on TV and say, “We are introducing this policy but no one has a clue how much it costs”? Any estimates that there might be—and we have heard from one independent source that it might cost £200 million to £300 million per annum—have not been fed into the budget process and therefore not been factored into the wider budget assumptions. What if you were to do that with every policy and just announced what you like? Having nothing in the small print that says, “This is how we came to that number. This is how much we as a Government know it will cost the public purse” does not feel like a sustainable way of running a budget in the long term.

Finally, do you have the feeling or the impression that the Scottish Government is, year on year, firefighting in the way that it makes in-year changes to the budget? By that, I mean emergency measures that move money from one budget to another. Over the past two years, money has been pumped into pay awards, pensions, social security and health and social care at the expense of agriculture, energy, housing, ferry services and education. Money is getting sucked out of other portfolios in the middle of the year to plug gaps as a result of policy decisions and spending commitments that must be fulfilled not just annually but, as you have rightly said, over the medium term.

To me, that feels like a very short-term way of managing your budget year on year. It is a bit like getting up in the morning and deciding how much you will spend that day, instead of looking towards the rest of the week or month. Again, does that indicate a picture of stability or good governance of public money?

Good morning, Auditor General. I am very surprised that you were not up all night studying the budget like everyone else was.

Yes, a draft budget was announced yesterday, but I want to look at the context, given your report and some of the wider issues around financial sustainability of public spending relative to revenue that you have been talking about for the past few months. I will reflect on some of what happened yesterday, but in that context, rather than in relation to the specifics of policy. I hope that that is helpful.

Over the 24 hours since the budget announcement, I have struggled to dig below the headlines. You will see a lot of media reporting around cash spend increases and promises to spend more in specific portfolios, but where that money is coming from is particularly unclear. That transparency issue is something that you raise in your report. How do we, as a committee and as parliamentarians, and the public get to the detail? How do we know where the additional money is coming from? I do not know where it is coming from.

What are some of the elements that you think are missing in terms of transparency from the Government that would allow the public to make an informed decision as to where the money is coming from?

Exhibit 4, which shows the barriers to accessing support, sums up the issues. It covers alcohol and drugs, but it talks us through the user journey very nicely, from the point of someone seeking help as an individual through to their getting help and then staying on the path to recovery. The list of barriers is unbelievable. There are so many barriers to people getting from the point where they identify that they have a problem to coming out the other side and being supported and in a better place in life.

I find the barriers that you have identified and the way that you have presented them to be quite extreme and quite shocking, to be honest. Perhaps that identifies the problem, because some people will engage with one or two of those issues on their journey, and others will face them all. Is that part of the problem? Perhaps that is the answer to my first question about why Scotland has such a big issue.

You will probably not answer this question, but in that case, what is the point of having a Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy at all if we do not have that bigger picture? All the questions that you have just raised are completely valid. They are in the report, and you have reiterated them today. We get the same feedback time after time about the lack of governance, lack of structure and lack of ambition, about knowing whether the money is going to the right people at the right time and whether it is being spent in the right way, and about getting best value.

The governance arrangements seem to be all over the place in relation to who those lines feed back to. Ultimately, you could argue that they all feed back to the minister who is in charge of it all and who is tasked with delivering progress, but it is clear that we are not seeing progress. Things are going in the wrong direction, not in the right direction. I am not asking you to comment on the policy, but you have analysed the outcomes and they do not look great. Anyway, that is perhaps a statement rather than a question, which is a bit unfair.

I want to talk about residential rehab, which is an important issue. It comes up frequently in Parliament, and I am trying to get my head around it. I have done a lot of work in this space, asked a lot of questions of Government and met a lot of stakeholders, but I still cannot work out whether we are heading in the right direction on residential rehabilitation for alcohol and drugs. There are instances where residential rehab is required for people with both those addictions, because sometimes people present with both addictions. You talk about the £100 million for residential rehab in your report, but you state in bold and big letters that you do not know whether that is enough. How will we know whether that is enough? How many beds do we need?

Residential rehab will not be suitable for everyone for lots of the reasons that you identify on page 33 of your report. From a practical point of view, services are not meeting people’s needs, whether that is because of where they are located or the type of service that is offered—for example, for mothers or for people who have additional issues that mean that they need mental health support alongside rehabilitation or detoxification services. Therefore, there are reasons why the service is not suitable for everyone.

However, it seems that you are saying that by planning a huge increase in residential rehab, you are admitting to failure much earlier in the system, because people should not have to get to the point where they need to spend eight, 10 or 12 weeks in a residential care setting. Their addiction problems should be treated much earlier, which would negate the need for increased bed capacity. Is that what you are saying?