Chamber and committees

When the Scottish Fiscal Commission gave evidence to us last month, it suggested 21 separate areas for improvement in data collection to allow it to do its work more effectively—and that was just for the commission. The committee and its predecessors have been talking about data for a good decade or so. I realise that, as a devolved Administration, you do not have the same access as the UK Government has, but it is still an area where we need significant improvements.

Before I wind up, are there are any further points that you want to make following our questioning that we have not touched on, or is there a burning issue that you want to get over in relation to the national performance framework and how we go forward?

The £160 million is not being spent: it has been lost to the budget.

The Basque Country, which has 35 more years of tax devolution than we have, says that 2 or 3 per cent does not make much difference but that, once you get above that, the tipping point becomes quite dramatic.

I open the session to colleagues around the table. The first to ask questions will be our deputy convener, Michael Marra, to be followed by Michelle Thomson.

Thank you very much. Just before we wind up, are there any final points that you want to make to the committee?

Thank you very much for that, Deputy First Minister. I appreciate your opening statement.

To go back to the beginning of the Scottish Government’s consultation process, you will be aware that a number of our witnesses raised the concern that the consultation was not ambitious enough and that awareness of the NPF has diminished because of the lack of ambition in the consultation. Some of the witnesses took the view that, if the consultation process is weak, the NPF is not being given the priority within the Government that it should be given. In fact, that seems to have been the case across a lot of the evidence that we took.

Way back in 2007, the NPF seemed to be almost revolutionary and quite dynamic in Scotland, but it seems to have lost a bit of its importance, as far as perceptions of it go. As John Mason pointed out to the finance secretary, it was not mentioned in the programme for government. One wonders just how much the framework underpins Government activity.

Okay, but the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce has suggested that

“removing the reference to the economy risks losing the focus on something that is a critical enabler of people’s wellbeing.”

You have mentioned wellbeing on a number of occasions. Many of those who responded to the consultation suggested that the framework should be renamed to something somewhat less tedious and boring than the national performance framework to, for example, “Scotland’s wellbeing framework” or even “Ambitions for Scotland”—that is, to something that is a bit more dynamic.

I know that the national performance framework has been the title since 2007, but it has hardly caught fire with the public. In fact, it is very similar to the national planning framework—it even has the same acronym. Why has the Government decided not to call it “Scotland’s wellbeing framework”, given that that is clearly the direction of travel from almost everything that you have said so far?

Good morning, and welcome to the 28th meeting in 2024 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. We are joined today by students and staff from the University of Dundee, who will observe the committee taking evidence on our pre-budget scrutiny. I welcome them and look forward to chatting to them after the meeting.

Moving on to today’s agenda, the first item is to take evidence from the Scottish Government on managing Scotland’s public finances, a strategic approach. I welcome to the meeting the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, Shona Robison. The cabinet secretary is accompanied by Scottish Government officials Jennie Barugh, director of fiscal sustainability; Richard McCallum, director of public spending; and Lucy O’Carroll, director of tax. I welcome them all to the meeting and invite the cabinet secretary to make a short opening statement.

One issue is widening the tax base to ensure that the Scottish Government has more resources. That is important whatever we do.

I want to talk about a successful Scottish Government initiative, which is the data-driven innovation initiative. That was signed in 2018 as part of the Edinburgh and south-east Scotland city deal, and it is delivered by the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, which I visited last week. It set a goal of supporting more than 400 entrepreneurs to raise £50 million within 10 years, and that has been resoundingly successful. In six years—not 10—it has managed to lever in more than £200 million of investment, rather than the £50 million target. Instead of 400, it has 500 cutting-edge companies that are raising funds to boost work that drives innovation.

However, I feel that the Scottish Government is not investing enough in such initiatives. For example, Universities Scotland gave evidence to us that, relative to the rest of the UK, investment spend has fallen by 16.2 per cent to 13 per cent in recent years. It said, and has given us the research sources that prove, that for every £1 that we invest in that area, 12.7 times that is put back into the Scottish economy. It said:

“If Scotland can recover its competitive position back to a 15.4% share of UKRI funds”,

which we had a few years ago,

“this would deliver an additional economic impact of at least £640 million to Scotland’s economy.”

Should we not be spending more than a minuscule proportion of Scottish resources in areas where Scotland is globally competitive—including, in your neck of the woods, the University of Dundee with its life sciences, and Heriot-Watt University with its robotics and research into marine and space and a myriad of other areas—so that we can have a prosperous, highly skilled workforce of the future?

We are really struggling for time, to be honest, given that other members have still to come in, and we have another session to come.

It will be lost twice next year because it is an on-going £160 million every year. It will be £320 million next year.