Chamber and committees

Right. To be clear, did you use that £3.5 billion figure in your estimates before the financial statement that you made, or were you using a different figure?

I will ask specific questions about where you, as forecasters, think there is the best potential for improvement in productivity and economic growth. Obviously, that is the bottom line in trying to improve the Scottish economy for the future.

I know that you cannot set policies and will not comment on that, but how easy is it for you as statisticians and people who are analysing the various trends in the economy to spot where there is the best potential for improving productivity and economic growth in the current set-up?

We might hold you to that.

You mentioned Covid spending in answer to Mr Mason. Can you or one of your officials confirm that Covid spend from the UK Government was £8.6 billion for 2020-21 and £7.1 billion for 2021-22?

That would be very helpful. Thank you.

Some of your recent analysis highlighted the fact that there are issues in relation to tax revenues from the north-east and the fact that some parts of the labour market there may change as a result of the just transition and changes in the structure of the economy.

Is it within your ability to set out where you think the greatest impact of the changes to tax revenues might be in the future, or is that something that you would let the Government do? I see tax revenues as absolutely critical. You have said in several consecutive reports that tax revenue is absolutely critical to how well the Scottish economy can perform. I would like to know how easy it is for a Government to set policy on the basis of your interpretation of that.

I absolutely understand that, but if we are to set effective policies it is helpful to know not only where the negative concerns are but where the potential for growth is. For several years now, your reports have highlighted tax revenue as being absolutely critical.

You have highlighted this morning, as well as within your report, that there are different factors to inflation. One is the cost push angle. Global prices, particularly in the energy market and in supply chains, are clearly causing very significant cost push. There is also the demand pull side. We are obviously hoping that demand within the economy and an eventual increase in earnings will drive that up. Are there different timescales in which the inflation effect will start to diminish? Is it different for the cost push and the demand pull? What is the likely scenario for when we will start to see inflation tailing off? Will that be largely because of cost push or demand pull?

Sorry, I will press you on this, cabinet secretary, because it is absolutely vital to the policies. It is extremely helpful that we have a statement that looks over a longer period of time—it is the first that we have had since 2011.

You are making choices and setting your policy commitments based, I hope, on what you see as the accurate statistics. Given what you said last week, I want to know what you think we need to take into consideration that changes the statistic that the Scottish Fiscal Commission produced relatively recently.

You said something interesting when you said that, if you felt that people were not performing as well as they should be, the accountability level might be raised slightly, so that there were sticks rather than carrots to get them to perform better. Is the Scottish Government seriously considering that?

I will ask about an important dilemma in all this, which has been raised by three sets of witnesses—when we took evidence from Fife Council last week and from the third sector about four weeks ago, and at our workshop in Dundee. All those people are broadly in favour of the national performance framework’s principles, but they said that the best outcomes are those that are owned locally. When local communities come up with ideas and feel that they are making the best progress, that is when they—perhaps led by local government—have ownership of what they are doing.

The dilemma is that, if the best performances can be driven from a local bottom-up scenario, some of the 11 projected outcomes in the national performance framework may get more emphasis in one region compared with another region or in one local authority compared with another local authority, and other outcomes will be lower on the agenda. Dundee City Council gave us the example that it felt that it was making good progress on child poverty but that, as a result, it was not focusing on the other outcomes.

Are some of the best outcomes being driven by local empowerment? If so, does that challenge the need for such prescriptive oversight from national Government of what we are trying to achieve?

I have two quick questions. You described the outcome agreements between universities or colleges and the Scottish Funding Council. Do graduate apprenticeships feature in those agreements?