Tavish Scott: Why ‘OBR with a kilt’ will protect taxpayers

MINISTER, let me ask you about the figures on page 18 – can you explain the change here?” Unlikely, I thought, before offering a less than convincing but lengthy answer.

So goes the life of a finance minister asked by a parliamentary committee to detail £30 billion of spending on everything from nursery care in Auchterarder to bus investment in Drumchapel. No minister can expect to have all the answers. But MSPs need to know what questions to ask and which to avoid, if they are government back-benchers.

I pondered all this at former MP and MSP Donald Gorrie’s funeral. He was a questioning back-bencher in the first two terms of the Scottish Parliament. Donald always put Scotland and the need for transparent information before his party. That may have been uncomfortable if you were the minister, as I was, but it was right. There is precious little of that in today’s Scottish Parliament.

The understandable obsession with the constitution obscured the most important proposed law in the Scottish Government’s plans this week. That is the budget bill. Spending and the changes in spending matter. Scrutinising any government’s natural inclination to hide the detail matters. But this year’s budget bill faces less scrutiny than ever before. A government majority in parliament means that Nationalist ministers will get their way. Never before has there been a stronger need for independent analysis of Scotland’s budget.

The UK government got this bit right. They divorced economic and financial forecasting which could be manipulated by politicians from central government. They established the Office of Budget Responsibility. The OBR is not a friend of the UK Chancellor. It is not meant to be. The OBR provides an independent assessment of the nation’s books for the government, but also for all MPs, policy makers, you and I. The headline growth figure indicates whether we are in or out of recession. The OBR believes the UK is currently in recession. When they consider the economic numbers have improved then their forecast will change accordingly. No such emphatic independent assessment is made of the Scottish Government’s performance.

Scotland needs an “OBR with a kilt”. Scotland needs to judge where best to spend taxpayers’ money. Take one example. Free personal care is not affordable in its current form say those who have studied the finances. Rubbish says the Scottish Government. Instead of rhetoric, decision-making by ministers and parliament should be based on fact. A Tartan OBR would provide fact unadorned by political spin and manipulation. The closer the Scottish Government are to their principal objective of independence, the less regard they have for inconvenient facts. No embarrassing economic or financial analysis based on fact will be produced by any Scottish civil servant or quango this side of the 2014 referendum vote. Yet Scotland needs to be bigger than one party’s narrow view. Children in Auchterarder and people catching the bus in Drumchapel deserve better.