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Thank you.

Thanks. I will go back to the convener’s line of questioning on the capital budget and the severe pressures that you laid out. What impact do the revised capital borrowing powers from the fiscal framework revision have on that? I will expand on that a little. How do you approach decisions on whether a capital project receives funding directly from the capital budget allocation versus where it will be funded from borrowing?

To press you on that a little bit, I am looking for clarity around whether, on a project-by-project basis, funding directly from the capital budget allocation or through borrowing ultimately makes any difference. If so, what approach does the Government take to deciding whether each project is funded by one or the other?

Thank you. On the budget timeline, Deputy First Minister, you mentioned in your opening statement that the time when the UK Government sets its budget has a significant impact on the Scottish budget, as well as a knock-on impact on every organisation, particularly local government, that is funded by the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Governments. I know that, in recent years, you have consistently made representations to the UK Government about that. I note, however, that Rachel Reeves has set out that an incoming Labour Government would also aim to set its budgets at the end of November. Given that, on a Government-to-Government basis, it is legitimate to speak to the UK Government, has the Scottish Government—not the Scottish National Party or the other political parties—made any representations to the Labour Party, as a potential incoming UK Government, on the impact that setting UK budgets at the end of November has on devolved finances?

To go back briefly to the Verity house agreement, I am still not completely clear about what we should expect the impact of that to be on the coming budget and how it will impact on our ability to scrutinise the budget. If you can say anything to expand on that, that would be useful.

My main line of questioning is about the deficit of £1 billion, rising to £2 billion, that we are looking at in the immediate future. We need to close that deficit just to meet existing commitments while growing demand. We have to factor in our statutory targets, such as reducing child poverty and tackling the climate emergency, both of which require significant levels of additional spending. Has the Government done any work—I recognise that this will be a broad range and that there is a significant margin of error here—to quantify how much spending will be required on top of the difficult decisions that we will need to make to close the gap and to meet existing commitments and rising demand? Has any work been done to quantify just how much more we will need to meet targets in law? I recognise that other targets are set in policy but not in legislation, but we have some significant targets in legislation, and I am concerned that there are no figures attached to how we meet them.

Thank you. I have a specific question on additional support needs spending. If you do not have the relevant information to hand, I will understand. However, there is a wider point that I want to make. I put this question to the local authority officials last week.

The local financial returns for 15 of the 32 councils record nil spends on additional support needs outside special schools—in other words, on ASN in primary and secondary settings. Obviously, those authorities are spending money on that; every local authority spends substantial amounts on ASN in primary and secondary settings. The question is how we track that spend. The committee will endeavour to find out why some local authorities record their spending in that way and why others provide more detailed information on their ASN spending.

I take your point that the Government has put in substantial investment, the vast majority of which is not ring fenced. However, the Government has a specific interest in improving outcomes for young people with additional support needs. How do we track the impact of that spend, particularly when it is hard to track how much spend there is in the first place?

How do we strike the right balance and resolve the tension between what we have all signed up for with regard to focusing much more on outcomes rather than inputs and the reality that significant importance will always be placed on the amount of money that we put into the system? Inevitably, there will be political debates about where that money is prioritised. In this case, the outcomes for young people who have diagnosed additional support needs are the most important thing for us to measure. However, we can still tell quite a lot from looking at the amount of money that we are putting into the system and where it is going, and then tracking that against the outcomes.

How does the Government balance those things in areas such as ASN, particularly given the inconsistency in the data? Ultimately, you cannot set a budget based on outcomes; the budget needs to explain how much money will go to X, Y and Z.

Yes. Thank you, convener.

A vast amount of funding has gone into expanding early years provision. Notwithstanding the challenges that have been highlighted, the direction of travel has been broadly positive.

However, one significant area of concern for me is childcare and nursery provision in colleges. The issue is similar to the convener’s point about working and living across local authority boundaries. For a lot of parents, particularly those whom we really want to see in college, for whom we want to break down those access barriers, having childcare provision on the college campus that they are attending is essential to enabling them to access further education, but we are, pretty continuously, seeing a loss of college nursery facilities.

The most recent one that has been flagged up to me is at New College Lanarkshire’s Cumbernauld campus, although there is a bit of ambiguity around whether that facility will be closed just for six months before a new operator reopens it. Regardless, the overall trend has been a loss of capacity in that regard, whereas we have seen a significant expansion of provision elsewhere.

Has the Government discussed that directly both with colleges themselves and with the local authorities in which they operate?

That would be helpful. Thank you.

I have a couple of questions about the tracking of spending on additional support needs. The context is probably the Verity house agreement, so I would like to briefly return to that. You described the process as an iterative one—in other words, the fiscal framework will not be fully brought in for the coming budget, which makes sense. However, I want to probe further on that. Is it expected that all those arrangements will be in place by the end of the parliamentary session or by the time of the next council elections in 2027, or is there not a fixed timescale for that because the process will evolve on the basis of the relationship?