Meeting of the Parliament 11 December 2013
Mr Johnstone says that we are borrowing less. I thought that Mr Johnstone did not like it the first time that I went through the figures, but I will go through them again, just to prolong the debate for him. The UK Government is borrowing £197 billion more than it planned to do in 2010. That is not a good result, in my estimation. The simple point that I would make to Margo MacDonald is that, although there is welcome growth in the economy just now, the scale of the damage is enormous.
Mr Gibson, the distinguished convener of the Finance Committee, made the point in one of his substantially evidenced interventions that economic recovery in a number of other countries has been a great deal more dynamic than it has been in the UK. The economies of Germany, Canada and Japan are now in excess of their pre-recession peak. The UK economy is not, and neither is that of Italy, which is also in the G7. We have to keep that context in mind.
The economic performance of Scotland has been strengthening since devolution, and I pay tribute to some of the work that my predecessors did to improve it. Full-time weekly pay has increased from 5 per cent below UK levels to within 2 per cent; Scotland’s unemployment rate has moved from being 1 per cent higher than the UK rate in 1999 to being 0.4 per cent lower in 2013; and our employment rate has moved from a position of 2.4 percentage points below the UK’s to 1 percentage point higher than the UK’s in 2013. Those are all welcome steps under devolution and are examples of how we in this Government and our predecessors have used the powers that are available to us to improve economic performance.
However, we must be mindful that other countries have improved their economic performance by a more substantial degree and that, if we had had more economic powers, we could undoubtedly have delivered stronger economic performance. To address Margo MacDonald’s point, that would have enabled us to make an impact on the living costs and remuneration of members of the public in our society to improve their ability to meet the cost of living, which I acknowledge is a challenge for people today in Scotland.
Mr Brown talked extensively about business rates. In my statement a few moments ago, I set out the Scottish Government’s decision to cap the annual inflation increase in business rates at 2 per cent. Mr Brown can characterise that as he wants, but I am simply fulfilling my manifesto commitment to ensure that business rates in Scotland do not rise faster than business rates in the rest of the United Kingdom, which was not the position that I inherited from my predecessors but which I have been able to deliver as part of the budget settlements.