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The next item of business is an announcement by the Finance and Public Administration Committee on quality and consistency of financial memorandums. I call Kenneth Gibson, the convener of the committee, to make the announcement. You have up to three minutes, Mr Gibson.
16:55
I am grateful for the opportunity to make this announcement on behalf of the Finance and Public Administration Committee on a matter that is relevant to us all in the chamber, and regards scrutiny of legislation. As members will be aware, the committee is responsible for scrutinising the financial memorandum of each bill. We have repeatedly identified issues with the quality of information that is presented in financial memorandums, as well as a general lack of consistency in how that information is presented. We have highlighted our concerns in successive reports and letters to lead committees and to the Scottish Government.
In response, the Scottish Government sought a consolidated list of committee expectations on financial memorandums. We subsequently reviewed our scrutiny of recent FMs and the recommendations that we made against the guidance that is available to Scottish Government bill teams, and found that most of our concerns would not have arisen if that guidance had been consistently applied by the relevant bill teams. Many of the recommendations that have been made in our letters and reports are already covered in the Scottish public finance manual.
We therefore wrote to the Minister for Parliamentary Business in June, asking the Scottish Government to put in place enhanced training and development for bill teams in order to improve the quality and consistency of presentation of future financial memorandums. We reiterated a number of specific recommendations in relation to margins of uncertainty, the standard usage of the gross domestic product deflator measure of inflation, our preference for financial information to be set out by reference to specific provisions in a bill, the use of summary tables; and our expectation that unnecessary replication of text from other bill documents should be avoided.
We welcomed the ensuing commitments from the Minister for Parliamentary Business that the bill handbook and other guidance will be updated to reflect our recommendations, and that the Scottish Government will seek to ensure that there is consistent application of that guidance in the development of future FMs.
The committee suggested that requested updates on bill costings—for example, for the financial memorandum for the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill—should be presented in a co-ordinated way annually, alongside the Scottish Government’s medium-term financial strategy. We will continue to pursue the matter with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government.
We also urged the Scottish Government proactively to write to the committee as soon as it becomes aware of any significantly revised figures, including margins of uncertainty, for FMs during stage 1 of a bill’s passage. Again, the committee welcomes the minister’s commitment to revise the Scottish public finance manual to emphasise that requirement.
The Finance and Public Administration Committee will continue to monitor the quality of and the detail that is provided in FMs, including in relation to framework bills, which can be more challenging to scrutinise and in respect of which it can be more challenging to establish their overall costs. It is hoped that the updated guidance and renewed focus on training will lead to improvement in the information that is presented to Parliament and, consequently, in the scrutiny of such documents in the future.
I invite members to draw upon the committee’s work in their scrutiny of legislation.