26 September 2003
The Scottish Executive is under fire from a senior parliamentary committee over lack of clarity in the spending plans announced in its recent 2004/05 budget.
The Parliament's finance committee is to call on ministers to provide more consistent information, so that the effect of changes over the previous five or ten-year period can be properly scrutinised.
The move follows the committee's consideration of the budget, which showed the provision of £525m to finance new commitments and allow an increase in reserves.
Former enterprise minister Wendy Alexander told the committee that, in a post-Enron environment, common accounting standards were being enforced on the corporate world and that 'we need to apply those same high standards to ourselves in the public sector'.
Alexander, MSP for Paisley North, believes there is a case for consistent data going back over the past ten years and enabling an assessment of differing priorities that have emerged since Labour took over from the Tories in 1997 and the Scottish Parliament came into being in 1999.
She said the budget proposals showed that considerably less was being spent on enterprise and there was a 24% cut in the regeneration budget. She asked: 'Is that consistent with closing the opportunity gap? Those statistics would be more meaningful if we had a ten-year trend, not just a one-year trend.'
Budget adviser Professor Arthur Midwinter agreed there was a problem in obtaining information on the same cash basis due to changes in recent years, including the introduction of resource accounting and budgeting.
He said prices were assessed on a different basis over the past five years. It meant a department's share of the budget could rise because of an accounting change rather than a policy decision.
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