Chamber and committees

Are you saying that the objective remains the same but that the path to it has changed?

Indeed.

Thank you for your opening statement, which is very helpful. It is interesting to see where we are compared with where we were less than a year ago. It is now broadly accepted that the financial memorandum that was produced was simply not up to the job, so it is good that the Scottish Government has had a complete rethink in that regard.

It is important that we are able to effectively scrutinise the financial memorandum. On 9 May, you said that you intend to give us four weeks before the stage 1 debate to scrutinise the updated financial memorandum. Is that still the Government’s position?

You did not answer my question about how Scotland compares with other parts of the United Kingdom with regard to attractiveness for setting up a business.

I apologise. When I was asking questions earlier, I assumed that the figures were based on a quarter, but I now realise that they were monthly.

I had an Ardnamurchan holiday back in 1998 or 1999 and it was exactly like that then. It is clearly an issue in that part of Scotland. The only thing that I could get to feed the kids was beans, chips and chicken nuggets, which was not what I wanted to feed them. That was a quarter of a century ago.

I thank our witnesses for their contributions. We have run a wee bit over our time, but that is testament to the evidence that we have heard today. We will continue taking evidence on the sustainability of Scotland’s finances at our next meeting, when we will hear from the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Finance.

That concludes the public part of today’s meeting. The next item on our agenda, which we will discuss in private, is consideration of our work programme. We will move into private session and there will be a two minute break to allow our witnesses to leave.

Thank you. It is important to get that clarification on the record.

One of the things that concerns me—I am sure that other members will raise this issue—is that the costs that have been provided, such as those for 2021-22, 2022-23 and the current year, do not give us much more than the top-line costs. It would be useful to dig down into the costs, so I will do a wee bit of digging and I am sure that colleagues will do more of that as the meeting progresses.

In your opening statement, you talked about the need to look again at the profiling of expenditure. The annex in our papers shows the actual costs after revision, which are obviously the most important ones. In 2021-22, £1.387 million was spent on staff. In the following year, the figure increased quite dramatically to £9.8 million. One would anticipate that, because a lot more work was done to flesh out the bill. However, in the first quarter of the current financial year, the figure seems to have fallen back quite significantly to £923,000, which is only about a third of the quarterly spend in the previous financial year. Can you explain why there has been such a dramatic change in those figures?

It would have been useful to have more detail on that.

I will let in colleagues in just a second, but minister, do you agree that the bill now seems to be about evolution rather than revolution? Has the big bang that we saw last year and which hit the rocks of a financial memorandum that just did not add up been transformed? Is the Government now looking at putting in place something radically different than what it was going to put in place a year ago?

The next item on our agenda is to continue taking evidence on the sustainability of Scotland’s finances as part of our pre-budget scrutiny. I welcome Rachel Cook, deputy head of policy, Federation of Small Businesses Scotland; Sandy Begbie CBE, chief executive officer, Scottish Financial Enterprise; and Louise Maclean, business development director, Signature Pubs, who is representing the Scottish Hospitality Group.

I intend to allow up to 75 minutes for this session. I say to our witnesses that, when they want to be brought into the discussion, they should indicate to me or the clerks and I will call them. You do not all have to answer every question but, if I put a question to an individual, feel free to say that you wish to comment as well. We have your written submissions, so we will move straight to questions, which I will open. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe—who will I put my first question to? I will put it to the FSB.

The FSB has talked a lot, as has the Scottish Hospitality Group, about support for businesses, which is of fundamental importance for your sector and for the Scottish economy. Where are we on that? The FSB has said:

“more than half of the businesses who responded [to our survey] do not feel Scotland is currently an attractive place to start up a business”.

First, how does that relate to other parts of the UK, Ireland or anywhere else? It is important to get that in context. Secondly, will you talk us through what the Scottish Government could do to make Scotland a more attractive place in which to do business?