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Good afternoon. Professor Bell, you identify what I think is probably a clear disconnect or discord between the budget and other initiatives, such as the programme for government and the national performance framework. In relation to economic growth, you observe that, in the budget this year, there was an allocation of £15 million for an enterprise package but, beyond that, there was very little investment in measures to encourage growth. You identify that, in real terms, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and South of Scotland Enterprise have, in effect, had their budgets cut. That leads you to say:

“The overall effect of budget measures on economic growth would be extremely complex to evaluate, but there is a strong case for combining relevant expenditures and discussing plausible scenarios as to how these expenditures might together influence the desired outcome”,

which is higher economic growth. In effect, the budget is bust without that. Who should be doing that work? Should it be the Scottish Government or the Scottish Fiscal Commission, or could it be Professor Spowage? Clearly, there is a need for that to happen, because the fundamentals of the budget are looking particularly dicey at the moment.

Super. Thanks very much.

That is useful to know. Most of what I wanted to cover has been covered, but I want to ask about the old chestnut of in-year transfers across portfolios. In your submission, you repeat the argument that those transfers

“should be baselined rather than done on a recurring basis.”

You say that the Scottish Government should do that to allow more meaningful comparisons to be made across portfolios.

The cabinet secretary gave us her account of why that is not happening—she said that the money that is spent by schools that relates to health will first go into the health budget and then be transferred. Is that a decent reason for making such in-year transfers, or is there another reason why the Government likes having the ability to make such large cross-portfolio transfers?

I have a slightly more generic question, which relates to forecasting. What role is artificial intelligence likely to have in assisting you in the accuracy or the development of forecasting? Are you debating that in the organisation?

Finally, you will have seen in the submissions from the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland recommendations or calls for us to move to a system where we have a fiscal bill or a finance bill. My colleague Stephen Kerr said that a finance bill

“would consolidate tax and spending proposals into a single legislative package, providing a clearer, more coherent narrative of how revenue generation aligns with expenditure.”

From your perspective, based on your experience at Westminster and here, would that assist us in some way in tracking how the money is being spent and how tax aligns with expenditure?

You referred to the need to look more into departmental spending rather than look only at the headline figures in order to assess sustainability. The Scottish Government frequently says that there needs to be a pivot to preventative spend, particularly in relation to healthcare—indeed, the Scottish budget is predicated on that. Can you deploy any tools or benchmarks to assess whether there is actually a shift in portfolios towards preventative spending rather than dealing with the consequences of problems that are already there?

Politically, does the practice allow the Government, in effect, to announce the expenditure of the same money twice?

Lastly, the convener referred to the need to ensure that funding is properly allocated to the portfolio from which it will be spent. You have said that the fact that that does not happen probably affects your forecasting. It definitely impedes our scrutiny function. Why do you think that the Government is still reluctant to go as far as it could in relation to that relatively simple switch in methodology?

Thank you, convener. Good minds think alike. I had eight questions, and you have asked seven of them, which have been comprehensively answered, so this is probably going to be one of my briefest contributions.

I want to go back to the cycle of parliamentary elections and the medium-term financial strategy. Is another risk for Scotland the fact that we seem to have a never-ending cycle of elections? Last year, we had a general election after which the assumptions of the previous Government were, in effect, disregarded and the supposed black hole emerged. We have seen various fiscal events since then.

You say that you want to have greater financial transparency and more stable ground, but to what extent are the parts of the UK that have devolved Administrations further undermined in projecting forwards as a result of that cycle? At the end of the day, particularly in the run-up to general elections, politics is short-termist in nature. Often, the political and economic narratives are absolutely one.

Do we need to be alert to that in Scotland? We had an election last year, we have an election next year and we will have local government elections the year after, and we could have a general election the following year. Does that not make your job, and the job of the Parliament, more difficult in trying to get security and forward-looking provision?

In your role as a trusted adviser to Governments of all political persuasions, you said last summer that you wanted there to be greater transparency on Scottish Government pay awards. Do you get the impression that that advice has now been heeded?