Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2020
Kate Forbes has, in a very short timescale, taken on a difficult task in stepping into the breach to lead a budget process, with no finance secretary in the Cabinet. All political parties have a responsibility to be constructive in the process, but Kate Forbes is also going to have to be constructive with us, in trying to build political agreement such as has not been built prior to the introduction of the budget.
There is much talk of the climate emergency in the document, as there was in Kate Forbes’s statement to Parliament. The area in which Scotland is clearly failing the climate is transport. Emissions are going up, not down, which is due largely to long-standing Government policies. The transport strategy that was announced yesterday contains little sign of the substantial changes that are needed if we are to make the progress that we need to make.
In the budget, I can find no evidence of a shift away from the damaging traffic-inducing transport projects that the Government has been supporting until now. That shift would free up resources to invest in reversing the decades-long trend towards ever more expensive public transport. The widely supported policy of free bus travel for young people, which the Greens and the Labour Party have been advocating for months, would be a substantial step in that direction.
Given the tight timescales that are involved, can Kate Forbes give a clear assurance that she will look with an open mind at all the options that the Greens and others are putting forward for transformational change, and an assurance that the budget is not being presented on a “Take it or leave it” basis?