THE Finance Secretary has defended the transparency of the Budget process after facing questions from MSPs over extra funding worth £220 million.
Derek Mackay was accused by members of Holyrood’s Finance Committee of having additional cash “squirrelled away”.
The committee passed the Budget Bill at its second parliamentary stage but Mackay was grilled on the additional resources to be made available in 2017/18.
Last week his tax proposals were voted through their first stage at Holyrood after the government struck a deal with the Greens.
Mackay told the committee the additional £220m included underspends of £47.5mn in resource funding, £42.5m in capital funding and £35m in financial transactions carried over from the previous year.
Tory MSP Murdo Fraser said: “It turns out you had down the back of the sofa the best part of £200 million you weren’t telling us about. How can it have been fair to Parliament and its committees, which were scrutinising your draft Budget and trying to carry out detailed and proper parliamentary scrutiny of that, when you had all this money squirrelled away?”
Mackay responded: “I had to work hard to try and identify resources to try and meet the consensus in Parliament that I wanted to deliver and that did mean policy decisions, it did mean making an early decision around how we allocate budget exchange and ensure officials turned over every possible stone to find extra resources to be able to allocate as part of the budget position.”
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