This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

Since it emerged as a mantra of the Watergate scandal and its assorted slush funds, “follow the money” has become a beloved motto of journalists, even if economists beat them to it long before President Nixon stank out the 1970s.

Economists and reporters still try to follow the money, but it’s rarely simple and often infuriating. It can be particularly tricky when it comes to the Scottish Government’s finances, as many financial experts have long complained.

The government is fond of redesigning and renaming ministerial portfolios and then transferring pots of cash between them in thoroughly confusing ways.

This just doesn’t happen in the annual budget setting, it happens all year round. In 2022/23, for instance, there were £3 billion worth of these “internal transfers”, or 6.3% of the budget.

Moreover, money often gets added to Scottish budgets through the year by injections from the Treasury and spending patterns can change unexpectedly. 

So far in the current financial year, which comes to an end in March, SNP ministers have spent £800m more than they had been expecting on public sector wages because rampant inflation saw workers threaten to strike if they didn’t get chunky pay rises to cope.

It means budgets are always works in progress, slipping around like jellies on a plate. It makes tracking where the money goes, how it is spent, and what it delivers damnably hard. 

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While some of this is the nature of the system, there’s also a suspicion that ministers rather like this shell game as it cloaks their mistakes and confounds their opponents. As if!

Thankfully, help is at hand. The Scottish Fiscal Commission (SFC) is on the case. Holyrood’s independent budget watchdog has turned bloodhound.

On Tuesday, it published a fascinating new analysis of the Scottish Government’s budgets for 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25 which tried to cut through the fog.

Thanks, it has to be said, to more detailed data provided by the government itself, it was able to bring some overdue consistency and clarity to how our money is being spent.

It looked past the ever-shifting portfolios and cash carousel to where the money actually goes, using the UN’s Classification of Functions of Government (COFOG).

This let it track spending on 10 broad functions, including health, economic affairs, public order and safety, the environment, social protection, education, housing and culture.

The SFC applied this method to more than £50 billion of discretionary government spending in each of the three years.

This revealed some of the boasts the government likes to make about spending increasing on X or Y are on shaky ground, as the spending by function often see-sawed up and down between years only to return roughly to where it started. 

It also showed spending on social protection, principally welfare benefits, has been the clear winner in recent years, growing by 28% in real terms between 2022 and 2025.

Partly, this is due to a UK-wide increase in the benefits bill because of inflation, but also because the Scottish Government has pioneered its own Scottish Child Payment for low-income families.

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Perhaps more surprisingly, total spending on health (38% of the entire Scottish budget) has not kept up with inflation, falling by about 1% in real terms over the same period. 

Although day-to-day resource spending on health is broadly flat, capital spending, which includes maintenance as well as the building of new facilities, is down 15% in real terms.

It’s a welcome exercise by the SFC that sheds light on the underlying spending trends of the SNP-Green administration, ignoring its high-level spin.

For, as today’s US President, Joe Biden, wisely said: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” The SFC is helping us see it more clearly. 

Lest anyone think this is just sport for nerds, Tuesday’s finance committee showed how sloppy the government is capable of being with our money and why vigilance is vital.

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After MSPs trashed the finances behind the flagship National Care Service plan last year, ministers and officials managed to reduce the start-up cost by up to £1.2bn over 10 years.

The reform, which Nicola Sturgeon boasted would rival the creation of the NHS, has been eviscerated in the process, but that only shows how much of it was unnecessary.

It was always a legacy project, not a logical project. Thanks to the committee, a fortune has been saved and years of turmoil avoided. Well done – and keep following the money.