Meeting of the Parliament 08 January 2014
What I have said to the Parliament before is that we needed to have more sustained capital investment to minimise the suffering that people have endured. If Mr Rennie and his colleagues are prepared to turn a blind eye to the volume of suffering that members of the public have experienced through the prolonging of the economic difficulties that we have faced, that is not something with which I want to be associated. I would rather have invested in the Scottish economy and not had to deal with the cuts imposed by Mr Rennie’s Administration.
Of course, different steps could have been taken, because the chancellor has had to take different steps. Compared with his spending plans in 2010, he has had to borrow £197 billion more than was projected, and he has failed to deliver the nearly 6 per cent worth of value in the economy that was predicted in 2010 according to his original plans. When we consider the issues that we face in relation to the condition of the United Kingdom economy and the challenges that we have faced as an Administration, we have tried very hard to focus our economic policy and our investments on overcoming some of the obstacles that have been presented to us by the decisions that the United Kingdom Government has taken.
Over the next fortnight we will discuss the different parliamentary stages of the Government’s budget programme, which is focused on a variety of areas, such as the development of skills, the execution of our capital investment programme and steps to ensure that all aspects of Government policy are focused on economic growth. The programme of policy development that we exercise in our own competence is maximised to ensure that it contributes to economic growth in Scotland.
For example, we have attached a significant amount of attention to ensuring that businesses in Scotland have been able to take forward their investments in Scotland in the knowledge that they operate in the most competitive business rates regime in the United Kingdom. We are very proud of the fact that more than 90,000 small businesses in Scotland can pay either reduced business rates or no business rates. That is a policy commitment that we confirm very firmly to the Parliament today. We believe in our manifesto commitment to support the small business community with the small business bonus scheme and we believe that businesses in Scotland should pay the same poundage that businesses in England pay. Those are important commitments, which ensure that the business community in Scotland is able to plan for the future and invest in its operations and activities. We will continue to assert those things during the budget’s parliamentary passage.
The Government makes it clear that although we can achieve a certain amount of economic impact through the responsibilities that we have, we would want to do more with the greater powers of independence. We would want to focus policy much more by using the tax system to support innovation and the development of new technologies. We would want to ensure that the tax system was integrated and drew together various aspects of corporate taxation with the needs of our economy, and linked together employability, personal taxation and welfare policies in a coherent way. We could ensure that that system operated on a more focused and efficient basis. We could also take steps to support the development of a more integrated global economy, originating from Scotland, with even greater success than we have managed to deliver in the field of inward investment, on which the Government’s record is very strong.
Finally, we believe that boosting participation in the labour market is of fundamental importance to the growth and development of the Scottish economy. At the heart of the white paper that was published in November is the Government’s commitment to expand by a transformational amount the volume of childcare that is available in Scotland. We have explained, through “Scotland’s Future”, how that can be done only by having available the scale of resources needed to redeploy resources that we believe would be better spent in Scotland by investing in childcare, rather than on supporting the weapons of mass destruction that are currently supported by the public finances of the United Kingdom.
Our priority is to use those resources for the maximum economic benefit in Scotland. Within the Scottish Government’s existing devolved competence, we can take some of the steps on childcare that the First Minister outlined yesterday in a fashion that will lead to the creation of an additional 2,000 work places in the childcare workforce in Scotland, through £3.5 million that the Government will make available for the development of the childcare workforce. However, if we want to take forward the type of transformational effects of the childcare approach that we set out in “Scotland’s Future”, we must be able to take strategic economic decisions to redeploy expenditure to support investment in childcare, to support investment in the growth of the Scottish economy, and ensure that the resources and benefits that that generates can be reinvested to invigorate the Scottish economy, deliver growth and deliver new opportunities to the people of Scotland.
I move,
That the Parliament welcomes the positive signs of recovery in the Scottish economy over the past year; agrees that this recovery has been delayed by the UK Government’s economic mismanagement and cuts to capital spending; recognises that Scotland’s long-term potential will continue to be hampered by the large gap between rich and poor, the increasing concentration of economic activity in London and south east England and growing imbalances in the structure of the UK economy, which have been created by successive UK administrations, and agrees that, as set out in Scotland’s Future: Your Guide to an Independent Scotland, the powers of independence will enable future Scottish administrations to build a more resilient and fairer economy by combining powers over employment policy, migration, industrial policy and taxation to secure stronger levels of economic growth and job creation and create a virtuous circle where the full benefits of increased economic growth and participation are available to be reinvested for the benefit of all the people of Scotland.
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