Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I am pleased to be making this statement today, to share the lessons we learnt from our recent visit to Edinburgh to discuss the Scottish experience of fiscal reform.

During our visit, we met with representatives from the Finance and Constitution Committee of the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Fiscal Commission, and Revenue Scotland. One of the main roles of the Finance Committee is to consider the draft budget and how fiscal devolution to Wales is going to impact on how we do this. Members will be aware that the revised Standing Orders, and the associated protocol, have been agreed in preparation for this year’s budget, which will be the first to take place within our new funding arrangements. However, the committee is also considering a legislative budget process for the future.

In Scotland, where there is already a legislative budget process in place, a budget review group was set up to evaluate the Scottish budget process, specifically looking at public engagement, in-year scrutiny, fiscal framework, multi-year budgeting and scrutiny based on outcomes. The Scottish budget review group was made up of officials from the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government, as well as external public finance experts, including leading academics and stakeholders with extensive experience of fiscal and budgetary arrangements. The group published its report at the end of June and included a number of recommendations, with the aim of improving financial scrutiny in Scotland. I hope that the Scottish experience, and this report, will be useful tools for us as we prepare to implement our new arrangements, and as we go forward to consider a possible new process.

The establishment of this group in Scotland demonstrates the importance of building expertise in devolved fiscal arrangements, and it is imperative that the same level of support from experts is provided to develop our scrutiny arrangements so as to ensure that they are robust and effective.

Fiscal devolution and the changes in the Assembly represent an exciting and challenging time for Wales. As a committee, we have shown great interest in the preparations for the establishment of the Welsh Revenue Authority. Given that Scotland has already established its equivalent organisation, which has been operating since 2015, we feel that it’s important to learn from those experiences to ensure a smooth transition when the WRA is operational from April next year.

We heard from Revenue Scotland about the importance of stakeholder engagement when developing the website and promoting its role. Extensive engagement with stakeholders when designing the interface for the online tax system led to a high number of digital submissions. The Cabinet Secretary has previously committed to ensuring that this interaction with stakeholders is part of the process, but it’s still not too late to learn from the Scottish experience to ensure that any issues, however small, are ironed out before next April.

We met also with representatives from the Scottish Fiscal Commission, which has been operating on a statutory basis since April this year. The commission’s responsibilities include producing independent forecasts for Scotland, including forecasts for tax revenues, expenditure on social security and onshore gross domestic product. We learned that the commission and the Office for Budget Responsibility will provide fiscal forecasts for Scotland, but that the commission will be using data specific to Scotland rather than UK data that the OBR uses, which should make the commission’s forecasting models more accurate.

Rather than establish such an organisation here, the Welsh Government has appointed a team from Bangor University to undertake scrutiny of its budget forecasts. It appears that the key lesson from Scotland is the need to develop Wales-level data that are specific and timely beyond the data provided at a UK level by the OBR. Personally, I also believe that we will require a body such as the Scottish Fiscal Commission ultimately, as tax devolution is implemented. I note that the Cabinet Secretary has issued a written statement very recently, indicating that the establishment of such a commission is one of the options he is considering. The Finance Committee will examine this issue as we scrutinise the draft budget.

This work on fiscal devolution is an exciting time for the Finance Committee, and the Assembly as a whole, hopefully, and we hope that we can learn from the Scottish experience to ensure that our scrutiny arrangements are as robust as they can be. Thank you very much.