A number of things. We have already had a bit of a drains-up session about what we did—there was a very intensive effort to get the report out. From talking to the fiscal unit in the Government, my understanding is that the unit will shortly have its own drains-up about the process, which I think was intensive for that team, too. We have agreed that we will then come together and talk about what worked, what did not work and how we can work together more effectively, if that is needed. Our primary assumption is that we want to start much earlier for next year’s budget. We will be able to do that next year; we could not start early this year.
We are continuing to create and develop what I call relationships with our relevant organisations and bodies—I mentioned some of the Scottish agencies. We spoke to the chairman of the OBR at the beginning of the process in August, and we have been in touch and will talk to him more fully.
We have had a conversation with the Parliament’s budget unit—that is the wrong title, but I am talking about Simon Wakefield’s unit, which looks at the expenditure side of the budget. We want to make sure that we know what people are doing, to see whether anyone has ways in which they can help us or feed into our work.
We have been in touch with the interparliamentary finance network, which is the network of the UK nations’ fiscal and budgetary bodies. IPFIN has a get-together in November, to which I believe that I will be going—IPFIN invited me—so that we can go, meet, talk and find out.
We have been in touch with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which has a get-together in spring. Again, we have been invited to that, and we think that it will be useful, because we can learn from fiscal commissions from a number of countries. When the Finance Committee was doing work on whether to set up a fiscal commission, I think in February, you took evidence from the Swedish and Irish commissions. We have been in touch with both commissions. In fact, Andrew Hughes Hallett has spoken to the Irish commission and we have some paperwork from the Swedish commission. Part of our work is to find out more about how others do it. It is about building relationships, reaching more widely around the networks, understanding what we need and want, and having the right timetable to go into next year’s budget round.
I want to pick up on some of the questions that you are raising with us this morning, some of which came out of our report. The core of what we need to do is to explore those questions and find some answers. How much data is enough? What do we do when we do not have it? These are important questions for the future. We will set out to do all of that.
The other part of our work programme might seem like an aside but it is important. As I think the committee knows, we are being hosted at the University of Glasgow, which has been very co-operative and is in the process of giving us a little office and helping us to find a couple of research assistants. We need to continue that process until we are actually functioning there. We have a website, which, as you might have noticed, does not have very much on it. However, we got the report out at the right time, which was what really mattered, and our three names are on it. We want to do a little bit more with the website.
If anyone has any suggestions about what they would like us to do, please feed them in.