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Yes. I note that your projections do not incorporate the establishment of a national care service, but you predict that social care spending will grow by 135 per cent per person, which would be fuelled “by increased ... wages”.

I want to bring colleagues in, so I will not—you will be glad to know—go through the whole document. I will finish with a question on the annual budget gap, which is discussed in what is probably one of the most interesting and important parts of the report. At paragraph 5.8, you state:

“In the fiscal framework, the Scottish Government has more control over its spending than its funding.”

You talk about a funding gap that

“is equivalent to £1.5 billion in today’s prices”

and you say that, in order to address that,

“the Scottish Government ... have to consistently reduce spending or raise devolved taxes throughout the next 50 years.”

However, you say that the UK Government is able to fund its gap, which is also significant; you talk about the UK’s

“public sector net debt reaching”

an astonishing

“267 per cent of GDP in 2071-72.”

Will you talk us through the annual budget gap a wee bit and outline its implications for Scotland and the UK?

Thank you. I will open up the session to members of the committee.

Thank you very much. We have gone over time. Daniel Johnson was going to ask a further question, but we will have to call it quits there, I am afraid.

I thank our witnesses for their contributions today. We will continue to take evidence on effective Scottish Government decision making at future meetings. We will take a five-minute comfort break before moving on to the next item on our agenda.

Okay. It would be good to change the 64 figure to whatever the pension age is. Is it 67? I am trying not to think about that.

Thank you. I will open up the session. The first colleague to ask questions will be Daniel Johnson, to be followed by Michelle Thomson.

You will be glad to know that there will be questions. Obviously, I am not going to hog things too much, because time will be against us today more than I had hoped.

My first question is about the fact that you intend to publish one of those reports every five years. The Office for Budget Responsibility first started producing such reports in 2011 and has been producing them every year. Given the fact that there can be significant changes within a five-year period—such as a change of Government, a pandemic or Brexit—do you think that, in the future, you will look at changing that frequency? Rather than the reports being produced on a set timeframe, might you produce them in response to specific events?

The overall story is critical, because it is quite clear that Governments need to look very seriously at what is likely to happen. One of the things that grabbed my attention was the fact that, over 50 years, we are looking at a 72 per cent increase in output but a 218 per cent increase in health expenditure. The good news is that we are all going to live longer, but the bad news is that it will be a lot more expensive to treat us because of new and more expensive treatments, the introduction of technology and so on. Governments north and south of the border have to take serious cognisance of those developments.

In the report, there is a very interesting graph that shows that there will be divergence in population numbers. Figure 2.4 shows that, over 25 years, there will be a 31 per cent increase in Midlothian’s population but a 16.2 per cent decrease in Inverclyde’s population. You say quite clearly that you did not look at population numbers by local authority, but it is interesting that National Records of Scotland is predicting a 2.5 per cent increase in the population over that period, whereas the SFC is predicting a 0.5 per cent increase. That is obviously a difference of more than 100,000 people across Scotland. Can you explain why there is a significant difference in the figures that have been produced by the SFC and National Records of Scotland?

Yes, indeed.

In your submission, you said that net in-migration of 19,000 a year is not that significant, but if only 48,000 babies are being born, that figure would be quite significant—it would be about 27 or 28 per cent of the total. The net figure for the number of people who left Scotland in the 50 years before devolution was 2 million, but we had a much higher birth rate then. That is why the population remained static. It is only because the birth rate has fallen so significantly that we have this situation. If we still had the out-migration that we had then, we would be in real bother.

At paragraph 5.14 of the report, you say:

“The bulk of the sustainability risk is with the UK Government”.

At paragraph 5.15, you say that, in that scenario,

“the UK Government would have a deficit in its primary balance for almost all years of the projection. The deficit would gradually grow, reaching 11 per cent of GDP by 2071-72.”

The UK Government will clearly have to take corrective action, which will obviously impact on Scotland.

In paragraph 2.8, on page 16, you say that Scotland has a “projected net annual inflow” of about 19,000 people and that about 9,000 of those people will be from the rest of the UK. Over the months and years, I have said that a lot of the people who leave Scotland tend to be highly productive and educated people in their 20s and 30s and that a lot of the people who come from the UK retire to Argyll and Bute or to Arran, in my constituency, where they have a nice view over the Clyde to Skelmorlie and West Kilbride.

Overall economic performance will be impacted not just by the number of migrants. That goes back to the OECD’s point about intergenerational differences. Do you intend to take such issues into account more in the future?