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I will ask a final question on zero-based budgeting. Professor Bell, who will be giving evidence very soon, said in his submission:

“The UK Spending Review is a comprehensive ‘zero-based’ review that is forcing departments to justify the entirety of their spending, rather than the increment requested relative to last year’s baseline. It will involve ‘challenge panels’ including experts from the private sector and academia who will scrutinize departmental spending plans.”

What are the implications of that for the OBR?

Thank you. I am pleased that you have touched on the OBR’s review and that the Treasury has accepted the 10 recommendations. I was going to ask you about that, but you have covered a lot of what I was going to ask, so I will ask one final question before I open up the session to colleagues.

In your submission, you state:

“The OBR’s remit includes the responsibility to evaluate the long-term sustainability of the UK public finances and assess fiscal risks.”

The SFC has published a fiscal sustainability report, which the committee will be interrogating—or at least questioning—and taking evidence on next Tuesday. What kind of work have you been doing with the SFC in relation to its report and your own work?

You have pointed out that you are, of course, not responsible for the formal calculation of the block grant adjustments, which are produced by the UK Treasury. Let me phrase it in this way: would it be helpful if the OBR actually did that?

I always think that, for long-term projects—city region deals being an obvious example of projects with a long development period—a spending review never happens next week, next month or even next year. It always seems to be kicked down the road—there is always that worry as well.

I will open up the session to questions. Michael Marra will start, to be followed by Liz Smith.

When we discussed that issue during budget deliberations, we said that, because of in-grade rises, promotions and so on, 3 per cent really looked like being more like 4.5 per cent, but that is not being budgeted for.

I am jumping about a bit, because I do not want to take up too much time, given that other colleagues will want to come in. However, I want to cover a number of bases that others will want to touch on. I am not going to mention AI—David Bell’s report is laced with it—because I know that a certain individual will probably want to come in on that.

Professor Spowage, you talked about the MTFS earlier and you said that it appears to have

“the trappings of a strategic document but lacks a lot of detail that would be required for it to be a useful set of forecasts. There is no detail on how the spending projections are arrived at, and therefore it is impossible to scrutinise the priority of each and how realistic they are.”

You have also said that it has largely been “abandoned”.

Added to that, you talked about the fiscal sustainability delivery plan, and you said:

“It’s unclear why a different document is needed.”

I do not think you are the only person to have said that. The SFC has said something similar. Why do you think it has produced a separate document?

Thank you very much. I note that, on your website, you also have a transcript of your dealings with this committee, so members had better behave.

What can we do to try to improve things? What can we do to ensure that committees have greater influence on the Government’s budgetary deliberations? Those questions are for both of you.

We really appreciate the OBR taking the time and trouble to come up to Edinburgh. It is one of the highlights of our year, so I thank you very much and we hope to see you again.

I will call a five-minute break before we hear from our next witnesses.

For the second part of today’s evidence session on the Scottish budget, I welcome Professor Mairi Spowage, director of the Fraser of Allander Institute, and Professor David Bell, a professor of economics at the University of Stirling.

As with the previous panel, we will move straight to questions, the first of which is about your magnificent report, David. It covers so many bases that we will probably keep you here until it gets dark, which is your own fault for including so much good-quality information.

Regarding the influence and formulation of Scottish Government budget proposals, you say that

“The consensus from the responses to this inquiry is that external influence on the Scottish Government’s budget process is limited”

and that

“The year-round approach is problematic, given other pressure on committees.”

I know that you have looked into a number of committees in some detail. Based on your analysis, is that because of a lack of time, because the budget process is not a priority for those committees or because they feel that the work that they would do would not have an impact on Scottish Government policy?

How can that lag be reduced? After all, 18 months is a long time in the business that you are in.