Meeting of the Parliament 26 March 2014
If the member reads the Office for Budget Responsibility’s analysis that was published last week, I think that he will find that it gives very clear projections up to the year 2019-20. I think that the member will find, if he reads last November’s paper by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that it has 50-year projections for how an independent Scotland would function. I think that the member will find something similar if he looks at even the simplest piece of legislation in the Parliament, such as the Courts Reform (Scotland) Bill, which I was considering in committee this morning and which has 10-year figures for the legislation’s cost implications. If such projections can be done for every single piece of legislation, if the OBR can do them up to 2019-20 and if the IFS can do them for 50 years, I think that even the Scottish Government ought to be capable of producing more than figures for a single year.
That was our first concern. Our second concern is that the Scottish Government’s figures for 2016-17 are now obviously highly questionable. We challenge the Scottish Government to defend those figures in the chamber today and to make a pledge that it will update the figures to reflect the most recent analysis that was published by the UK Government, the “Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland 2012-13” figures and, indeed, the OBR’s figures.
Our third concern is that there are no costings for many of the policy commitments in the white paper and that not a single penny is attributed to the transition costs of moving from being part of the United Kingdom to being an independent Scotland. It is inconceivable that there would be no transition costs from unpicking more than 300 years’ worth of history and becoming a separate state. Nobody in the chamber could believe that no financial costs at all would be attributed to that.