Chamber and committees

Are you surprised—or, indeed, disappointed—that we do not have medium-term financial strategies from our Government? It seems to me that producing this kind of high-level strategy is a really basic aspect of the governance of public finances, but year after year, we hear these criticisms that it does not exist.

Just to throw a spanner in the works, some of the early analysis of yesterday’s announcement paints a bigger picture around how we get our heads around the transparency issue when ministers make announcements about new money. I was particularly struck by the summary from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. I am not sure whether you have read that yet, but it left me with more questions than answers. To summarise it briefly for the benefit of others, it paints a picture of announcements that are made on paper—by the way, this is backed up by the SPICe graphics that came out this morning—suggesting around a 5 per cent cash-terms increase or 2.9 per cent after inflation, so a real-terms increase. However, and this is key, it excludes £1.3 billion of funding that the budget documentation implies the Scottish Government still has to allocate to services this year. If that was to be taken into account, you are looking at a flat-cash settlement next year.

Where do I start with this? There is either a 5 per cent cash increase or there is not. I am of the understanding that the Government is unable to roll over money year on year, so how can unallocated money from this year be spent in next year’s budget, for example? Again, that all just raises questions about the veracity of some of the top-line figures that people are seeing in the newspapers this morning, which is why I think that it is important to dig under those figures. Do you have any view on that?

You talked a little bit about the budgets for the NHS, social care and social security. We all know the direction of travel for those budgets—they are becoming an ever-increasing chunk of expenditure for the Government. Presumably, any announcement—whatever the numbers are or whether they are increases of 1, 3 or 5 per cent—will either cannibalise the wider Scottish budget and the total pie available, or is reliant on some additional cash, the value of which is unknown, although we know roughly the value of the spending commitments. You talk about balancing the books. That may be the case, but big spending announcements are being made where there is no clear, backed-up and identifiable source for how those will be funded. Are we able to follow the money, or is there still a lack of transparency and clarity?

Thank you.

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.

Is that because alcohol is legal and commonplace? You would not need to walk very far from this room to buy alcohol this afternoon—arguably, the same could be true for drugs—but my point is that we have a different view of alcohol. Drugs are illegal, for want of a better term, but there is societal acceptance of everyday drinking—the phrases “acceptable norms”, “social drinking” and “safe levels of drinking” are all used. Is it just the case that we have a different take on alcohol? If the law suddenly made alcohol illegal, perhaps everyone would have a bigger focus on it, and if drugs were legalised in some shape or form, perhaps there would be a different societal view. Is how we perceive the harms just relative?

Based on some of the focus group work that you did and your conversations with stakeholders, would you say that the issues are massively underreported? Back in 2014, public health research showed that only one in four people who were dependent on alcohol or drugs was engaged in services. I believe that we are waiting for updated figures for the past decade to see whether access to and take-up of services have improved.

Do you think that alcohol issues are massively underreported? With alcohol, it is more difficult to spot problematic behaviours and to identify people who have dependency issues until they present with an extreme issue, whereas people with drug dependency issues perhaps present more quickly and sooner to health services and in a much graver or more extreme condition. Is the Government on top of that? Is it identifying the undercurrent of underreporting and the problem that exists in society but that is not being helped in any way by a public service?