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We know that there was a capital underspend of £130.4 million in the previous financial year, which has been carried over, so the spending power has not been lost. Where are we with regard to being on target for delivery of the full capital programme? Being unable to see how some projects are doing compared with others is frustrating.

I know that colleagues around the table have a lot of questions to ask—all six members have expressed an interest in asking questions.

I do not pretend to be Mystic Meg—I hope that no one will ask me for next week’s winning lottery numbers—but I predict that the same switch will happen next year and possibly the year after. I urge the Scottish Government to look again at where it positions those resources at the start of the financial year, because it seems daft to have to go through that process every year.

I understand what you are saying—you would not know the specific amounts—but if there was £1 million or £2 million going the other way, that would look better than transferring a huge chunk of money every year.

I thank the minister and his officials for their evidence. We will publish a short report to the Parliament setting out our decision on the draft instrument in due course.

As that concludes the public part of the meeting, we will move into private session to consider the remaining agenda items.

Good morning and welcome to the 31st meeting of the Finance and Public Administration Committee in 2024.

The first item on our agenda is an evidence session with the Minister for Public Finance on the draft Budget (Scotland) Act 2024 Amendment Regulations 2024. I intend to allow around 75 minutes for the session.

The minister is joined by two Scottish Government officials: Craig Maidment, senior finance manager, and Claire Hughes, head of corporate reporting. I welcome them to the meeting.

I also welcome to our deliberations members of a delegation from the Tobago House of Assembly, who are in the public gallery. I got married on the island of Tobago, which has very fond memories for me.

I invite the minister to make a short opening statement.

In time-honoured fashion, I will open with some questions before colleagues around the table come in.

My first comment is that the Scottish Government has pointed out that the UK Government’s autumn budget provided £1.433 billion in resource Barnett consequentials. I think committee members will be surprised that that amount is broadly in line with our internal planning assumptions and was already factored into our spending plans. Committee members were not party to any internal planning assumptions. How did the Scottish Government come to the conclusion that that was the amount of money that the UK Government was likely to allocate in Barnett consequentials?

Slightly less than 5 per cent of the health and social care budget is transferring out, but it is only 0.5 per cent for the rest of the budget. It looks out of kilter that such a huge chunk of money is being transferred from health and social care. It looks as if those are political decisions rather than delivery decisions. It seems that the revisions are being skewed each year.

Where are we with capital? We have seen, for example, £89 million from resource being put into capital, and we have seen that money being taken back out. Will you talk us through that a wee bit?

The volume of transfers in the autumn revision is about 2 per cent of the overall budget, which is now more than £60 billion a year. There are very significant changes in some portfolios within that budget; the one that I think is most significant is the transfer of some health and social care to local government. For example, we have seen investment of £257.2 million to support the integration of health and social care and the transfer of £230 million from health and social care to local government for staff providing direct adult social care. There are half a dozen more examples, amounting to some £909 million.

It seems that, every year in the autumn revision, we have a situation in which parts of the health and social care budget are transferred out. For example, we have £57.8 million going from health and social care to education and skills to pay for teaching grants for nursery and midwifery students. There seems to be a difference between where the policy is and where the delivery is. Every year, we ask whether there are any proposals to change that. Given that there is a transfer from health and social care to education every single year, surely it would be more sensible for that money to appear in the education portfolio at the start of the financial year.

I appreciate that, but the committee is a wee bit blind on that. At the time of the previous budget, we were promised a pipeline of capital projects in March of this year. That is now being put back to next year. We cannot really see where the Scottish Government is going and how it is managing to deliver on its objectives around capital, because we are not really able to see what those delivery objectives are. Are you able to enlighten us at all on any aspect of that?