At a time when most people are feeling the pinch, pressure is mounting on Alex Salmond to justify spending on the Council of Economic Advisers.
The CEA are a group of economic experts brought together by the SNP in 2007 to advise the Scottish government on how to achieve higher sustainable growth. Unfortunately, ‘experts’ are not what they were, the Council is chaired by George Mathewson, former Chair of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The Council meet quarterly, and, as they travel to Scotland from across the globe, it is understandable that they would incur travel costs. However, what has caused increasing disquiet, is the level of these costs, and the bills run up by the Council whilst they are in Scotland.
Five meetings of the Council between September 2007 and January 2009 cost the taxpayer almost £50,000 in flights and more than £8000 in car costs, most of which was spent on chauffeur-driven cars, to transport nine members of the 11 member Council, with Weir Group chairman Robert Smith and Jim McColl, Monaco-based Chair and Chief Executive of Clyde Blowers, paying all of their own travel costs.
The SNP government spent a further £6500 putting the Council up in hotels, and almost £12,000 on food and drink during the five sessions.
The biggest food and drink bill was for Dumfries House, where lunch and refreshments costing £1337 was followed by dinner costing £2238. At a further meeting, at Duff House in Banff, the Council ran up a £409 drinks bill including a 2006 Puilly Fume and Cotes du Rhone, malt whisky and vintage port.
This opulence, at a time of national belt-tightening, seems out of place and rather distasteful.
On the other hand, we are all too well aware of the need to position Scotland to come out of this recession in a strong position to meet the challenges of the future economic landscape. With this in mind, if the advice given by the Council will help to achieve this, it may be that the travel costs, if not the vintage port, may be money well spent.
The advice given by the Council is published in an annual report. So it is possible to determine whether the costs of the Council should be deemed an investment, or a flagrant misuse of the taxpayers money.
Last year’s annual report recommended that the Scottish government should: increase the general level of productivity in the workforce; encourage the development of key sectors and industries; and develop a range of policies that provide for greater efficiency in the provision of government and infrastructure services.
It is not a great stretch to imagine that the Scottish nation could have come to these conclusions without the input of a panel of internationally acclaimed economic experts.
The report also seems to conveniently support key planks of SNP policy, recommending the further devolution of services, and that the Scottish government should explore the possibility of new means of borrowing, outside the ‘Private Finance Initiative’, to help finance public sector infrastructure. How surprising.
The ego of our first minister is well renowned as the only Scottish landmark visible from space, but taxpayers money should not be used to further feed this vanity project which appears to only give advice which the SNP government wishes to hear.
In a climate of economic constraints, and increased scrutiny of how public funds are spent, it seems likely that Alex Salmond may find himself the focus of disquiet, and increasingly disgust, towards the SNP’s eagerness to waste money while the rest of Scotland struggles to get by.