Seòmar agus comataidhean

No, they are not. If a body did not put in an invest to save proposition, that does not mean that it is not getting on with reform work in its area. It will have to meet the efficiency targets and the workforce reduction targets, whether or not it put in a bid to invest to save. It is not that bodies only have to do that if they put in an invest to save bid.

Some of the bids will be a bit more ambitious, so some money is needed to oil the wheels of change, but not every change needs such money to be invested. The invest to save scheme is not the only story in town; it is an important one, but a lot of other work is going on in the background.

That could be an issue, which we need to avoid. The convener made a point about skills and experience. The approach needs to be managed; people will leave partly through natural attrition and voluntary severance, but organisations need to be mindful of who is leaving, because good-quality leadership needs to be retained in every organisation. We expect organisations to have that very much at the front of their minds.

Well, you know, you cannot will the means.

I hope that there is a genuinely constructive discussion, whether it is about Liz Smith’s bill or other issues, and we are approaching the budget in that vein.

Craig Hoy made an important point about local government budgets. Through no fault of our own, we are late because the UK budget will be at the end of November, and we have the backstop of the dissolution of Parliament. I would like us to think about whether we are able to take a more pragmatic, consensual approach and agree not to draw out the drama through the various stages of the budget. Apart from anything else, local authorities need to know their envelopes. We are keen to see whether there is space to build on that.

Good morning, convener and members of the committee. Your visit to Lithuania sounds very interesting, and I will be happy to follow up on some of the issues that arose there, perhaps at a later meeting.

I very much welcome today’s discussions as part of the committee’s pre-budget scrutiny. As a Government, we are committed to increasing transparency in our budget-setting process and ensuring that value for money and fiscal sustainability are achieved in the decisions that we reach.

As discussed in detail at our previous session, the medium-term financial strategy and its accompanying delivery plan reinforce the Government’s commitment to managing the public finances responsibly and delivering a balanced budget each year, alongside strengthening the fiscal position over the medium term. Redirecting resources to the most impactful interventions that support our strategic priorities will be key to our approach, and our public service reform strategy will tackle systemic barriers to reforming public services over the longer term.

I have looked across everything that we do, and we will make the changes required to protect services, driving efficiency in all areas of service delivery, including significant efficiency and reform savings across the public sector while reducing the size of the public sector workforce. That sets the landscape for our work on developing the 2026-27 Scottish budget—I am looking ahead to the new budget. I have followed the committee’s pre-budget scrutiny sessions with stakeholders with interest, and I look forward to exploring the topics and issues that have been raised with members.

The committee is aware that, since we last met, the United Kingdom Government announced its intention to deliver its autumn statement on 26 November. It was disappointing that there was no advance discussion with the Scottish Government on that, given the potential impact on the Scottish budget.

Noting the now unavoidable delay to the Scottish budget and the accompanying fiscal publications, members will be aware of my letter of 19 September and my inclination to propose Thursday 15 January 2026 as the potential publication date of the 2026-27 Scottish budget. I am keen to discuss that further with the committee and to seek your views on potential plans for the budget.

I appreciate that this is difficult for us all, and I have carefully considered the need to allow sufficient time for the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s forecasting and for parliamentary scrutiny, as well as Scottish Government considerations. The integrated nature of the Scottish budget means that it is important to keep the four fiscal publications aligned. I am therefore keen that the Scottish budget, the spending review, the infrastructure investment plan and the infrastructure delivery pipeline continue to proceed as a package and are published at the same time. I appreciate that there may be differing views on that, however, and I am happy to discuss that further.

I take your point. There is something about the transformation of the college estate going forward. If you do not mind, I will draw an example from my patch. Dundee and Angus College has been quite forward in its thinking. It has taken hard decisions about some of the courses that it provides and has tried to align its offering more with the skills that local employers and the workforce require. It also has ambitious plans for its estate. There is something about transformation—what our college estate will look like in future and what it will provide.

There is also a wider question for the skills sector, in which colleges play a key role. In the not-too-distant past, some big reviews have been done on that, which have indicated that we need to ensure that our skills landscape is delivering what young people and not-so-young people require for the workplace. I am not unsympathetic to the point that you are making.

It will cover infrastructure projects over £5 million and programmes over £20 million. There is a lot below that involving small projects. There are the projects that either have their business case or have their business case in process, and then there will be those that are in the phase beyond that. There will be big differences between some of the national infrastructure projects, which will be the big projects, and some of the more local infrastructure projects.

As you are aware, convener, we are constrained by the capital outlook. We have a very disappointing capital outlook from the spending review, so we are very exercised at the moment about how we can expand the capital envelope through other means. You will appreciate that we have a lot of ambition in the capital space and we do not want to be constrained in that ambition, so we are giving a lot of thought to that. We will set that all out when we come to it in January.

I think that the target was about a 0.4 per cent annualised reduction in workforce. I cannot quite get the numbers to hand, but we did have them and I can send you them. Essentially, convener, it is a downward trajectory—

Yes.

It must happen across the board. We need to lead by example, and changes have been made in the director-general territory to ensure that we do not ask others to do things that the top level of the civil service itself is not prepared to do. There has been a reduction in the number there in order to lead by example, which my portfolio very much needs to do.

However, in doing all that, we need to ensure that we are not losing the investment in, say, digital and automation, which needs to be—

I will check with justice colleagues exactly where that has got to, convener, and I will come back to you.