In December we published an overview of common themes found across Scottish Parliament committees’ pre-Budget scrutiny letters for the 2024-25 Scottish Budget.
This found that there were some common themes, and three key conclusions formed a wishlist of committee asks of the Scottish Government:
- There is a need for longer-term financial planning and multi-year funding, both in the Scottish Government’s spending plans overall, and in several portfolios, including a need to balance short-term pressures and preventative spend.
- The Scottish Government needs to make its strategic focus and priorities clear in several areas, and link this clearly to spending decisions.
- The Scottish Government needs to better demonstrate the link between policy and spending decisions and National Outcomes and do so in a holistic and cross-portfolio way. This includes evidencing decisions, explaining reasoning, and reprioritising of spend where needed.
As we noted in our overarching post-Budget briefing, as per the Budget Process Review Group recommendations in 2017, individual ministers are required to respond to committee pre-budget letters within five sitting days of the Budget being published.
In advance of the Committee Budget Debate on 1 February, this blog explores the extent to which committee recommendations appear to have influenced the Scottish Government’s decision-making process.
Because of the length of this blog post, we’ve added a table of contents to aid in navigation.
The role of committee budget scrutiny
In the Equality and Fairer Scotland Statement 2024-25 the Scottish Government says it has demonstrated accountability by referencing the committee pre-budget scrutiny process.
During pre-budget evidence to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, Mirren Kelly (COSLA) said:
“There is a question to everyone as to how much opportunity the committee approach gives to influence the budget. That is the key bit. If the scrutiny is successful, you have the ability to influence and make changes. Certainly, COSLA submits evidence to most committees during the pre-budget stage. We participate when we are invited, and we hope that that leads to discussion of the information and decisions to make changes that take into account the issues that are raised.
It can potentially be difficult to see where the change in decision is, just because of the way the process works. In the pre-budget scrutiny, we do not have a draft budget that we are trying to influence. It is positive to have conversations before decisions are taken, but they need to feed in and influence the change before it comes in.”
As well as full response letters being sent to each committee, a summary of the responses to committee letters was provided with the budget, though this became a separate annex to the main budget document and one committee was not included.
So, working through the responses, where have committees had an impact?
Where committees had an influence
Finding clear ‘wins’ for committees is challenging, but not impossible.
For instance, several committees were given clarification of timescales for reviews and framework development, and there were some improvements to data reporting. There were also regular instances of the Scottish Government expressing agreement with the priorities and points set out by committees.
The Scottish Government’s response to the Criminal Justice Committee’s report would suggest that where organisations asked for an increase in their resource and capital budgets and the committee passed this on, these organisations did see an increase in their budgets (though not always to the extent hoped for).
Within the Rural Affairs and Islands portfolio, the updated Capital Spending Review from May 2022 had a reduction to zero for islands programme capital in 2024-25. The Committee argued for a restoration of funding after hearing from islands local authorities during the pre-budget scrutiny stage that this would have a noticeable impact on islands. Ultimately, £3 million was committed to the islands programme where there was previously nothing.
This session the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee has consistently highlighted a number of areas of concern in relation to the cultural sectors. This includes emphasising the financial difficulties the sectors face. The Deputy First Minister said that the 2024-25 Budget included an increase of £15.8m for culture; she said that this is the “first step on the route to investing at least £100 million more in the arts and culture by 2028-29” and that the Government aims to “increase arts and culture investment in 2025-26 by at least a further £25 million”
Although it isn’t clear in these cases whether the committee recommendations are what led to these decisions being made, these are examples of what committees want to see happening coming to pass. It would be interesting to understand more explicitly whether pressure from the committees influenced the Scottish Government.
Where committees’ requests went unmet
As we explored in our main Budget briefing, several key asks of the Finance and Public Administration Committee went unmet, as was the overarching committee ‘wishlist’ that we highlighted at the start of this blog.
Promised detail on budget transparency was not forthcoming, nor were the multi-year resource budgets and updates on infrastructure plans that the Scottish Government had committed to. Issues which have been a focus of committee recommendations for some time, like public sector reform, continue to be lacking in detail with little progress evident, with the Committee saying in its Report on Budget Scrutiny 2024-25:
“The evidence we heard suggests that the Scottish Government remains focused on plugging short-term funding gaps at the expense of medium- and longer-term financial planning. We are not convinced by the reasons provided for delays in publishing multi-year spending plans, the public sector pay policy 2024-25, an updated infrastructure project pipeline and a financial strategy for public service reform. The impression given is that the Scottish Government is procrastinating on important decision-making that would help support medium- and longer-term sustainability of Scotland’s public finances.”
Several other committees made conclusions linked to preventative spending and longer-term financial planning, with no clear outcome from these bigger picture, strategic recommendations.
Transparency remained a powerful focus of pre-budget scrutiny, and several committees made very specific recommendations for improvements which were not adopted by the Scottish Government. For example:
- The Health Committee asked for clarity on several areas, including on what commitments remain in place, how the Scottish Government defines those commitments (e.g., “preventative spend”, “frontline health spending” or “mental health spending”) and what progress has been made towards those commitments.
- The Education, Children and Young People Committee’s pre-budget scrutiny letter included a call for the Scottish Government to clarify whether Higher Education and Further Education were still in line for flat-cash resource settlements (as this is what was laid out in the 2022 Resource Spending Review), following complications arising from in-year settlements. The Committee has since also called for clarity around cuts to the Lifelong Learning and Skills Budget.
While there were occasional clear responses, in many cases the response was wordy, but lacking meaningful or direct detail, and committees have felt the need to repeatedly ask for figures. In the case of the Education Committee’s requests, the Scottish Government has not provided the full detail requested in certain areas and the Committee has been asked to write again seeking this information.
It’s difficult to see how committees can meaningfully impact on the budget when calls for transparency and clarity go unanswered, and they are left unable to clearly see the changes between budgets or impact of spending decisions.
How committees are evolving scrutiny
As we’ve noted elsewhere, the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee focused its scrutiny process on a citizens’ panel, which used a deliberative process to come up with questions for the Minister. The panel and Committee were both disappointed with the initial response from the Minister for Equalities, Migration and Refugees, but the Minister did respond to the Committee’s request for more detailed answers in her post-Budget response. In post-Budget evidence, stakeholders emphasised the importance of the work the Committee had done to increase participation and said that both committees and the Scottish Government must do more of this work.
The Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee heard from Local Government Directors of Finance after the Budget had been published, which gave the Committee a clear area to focus recommendations for future improvements.
Using frameworks and principles had also proven useful for Committees as a means to test the integrity of the budget. This includes international standards, such as human rights and gender-based budgeting principles, but also new frameworks closer to home. The Verity House Agreement and its principles were referenced by several committees and seems to have proven a more useful scrutiny tool than the National Performance Framework (NPF). The upcoming review of the National Outcomes may give some opportunities, however, to make the NPF a more relevant tool for budget scrutiny.
Committees also honed the focus of their scrutiny a little more tightly in some cases, though there were instances where events and announcements overtook the intended focus of post-budget scrutiny. This was the case for Local Government, where the focus on workforce was drowned by disagreements around the settlement value, and for Rural Affairs and Islands, where the focus on islands was eclipsed post-budget by announced cuts to rural funding.
Should committees be more direct?
As we noted in our pre-budget blog, the language used by committees in their conclusions and recommendations varies a lot. It could be argued that unless committees are making specific requests for action, it may not be clear how the Budget might change as a result.
Although some Ministers chose to reference which recommendations sections of their responses referred to, these were often vague, as this example from the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee’s exchange of letters shows:
Will the Scottish Government commit to clearly setting out within budget documents the decisions made as a result of Committees’ recommendations?
Pre-Budget Scrutiny was provided in Chapter 3 in the 2023-24 Budget document. It is expected this will be included within the 2024-25 Budget documentation and will detail how the Scottish Budget 2024-25 has been informed by pre-budget scrutiny from Scottish Parliament committees.
Other letters are set out with a clear response to each recommendation, such as that to the letter to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee. As is the case in many letters, in this there are examples of ‘the right words’ being used, and a lot of discussion of pending strategies and approaches, but these narratives are often disconnected from the data.
For instance, the Scottish Government’s response to the Health Committee speaks at length about what it is doing about preventative spend, opening with:
The Scottish Government’s approach to funding public services embodies a preventative approach, recognising the wide range of benefits this can provide, not least in maximising the health and wellbeing of the population which is critical to the delivery of outcomes across the National Performance Framework.
Yet, the corresponding budget lines, which are falling in real terms, are not referenced, and there are no clear links back to National Outcomes, performance against indicators, or illustrations of how preventative investment approaches are chosen.
Different questions, or different answers?
Even though the Scottish Government and its stakeholders agree on the importance of the role of Scottish Parliament committees in budget scrutiny, it’s challenging to see how exactly this accountability function plays out when the impact of committees is unclear.
Is this because committees need to ramp up their scrutiny process? Several have already tried innovative approaches but so far these haven’t led to a marked change in the impact achieved.
Do the recommendations by committees need to be clearer and more direct? Quite possibly although, in some cases, even clear and repeated requests have not been acted upon.
Or does the Scottish Government need to be more explicit in evidencing the impact of committee scrutiny?
The approach in Wales, whereby the Welsh Government must state clearly whether it accepts or rejects the recommendations of Senedd committees, may be one to watch.
Applying such an approach in Scotland would, if nothing else, make it clearer where the committees and Government are aligned and give the Scottish Government an opportunity to demonstrate that it takes the accountability role of the committees seriously. On the basis of SPICe’s ongoing cross-committee analysis, it seems likely that more transparency about Scottish Government processes, decision-making and budgets would also need to accompany this approach to make it meaningful.
Ailsa Burn-Murdoch, Financial Scrutiny Unit