Meeting of the Parliament 06 December 2023
Before I speak to our amendment, I apologise on behalf of my colleague Murdo Fraser, who is indisposed this afternoon, having fallen on the ice this morning. I understand that that is the case for other colleagues across the chamber. I extend the apology and wish them well in their recovery. I am afraid that members will have to listen to me twice today, as I will step in to perform the role of summing up.
Mention the fiscal framework and you can pretty much guarantee that a glazed look will come across the face of colleagues and journalists alike, such is its intense complexity and technical nature, but it matters hugely for the reasons that the cabinet secretary has set out. That is not just because of its importance to Scotland’s available finances but because of the need for Westminster and Holyrood to work together to get the best deal for Scotland. I believe that that is exactly what the public want and what they deserve.
We can see, yet again, from the Government’s motion and from what the cabinet secretary said in her speech that the Government does not really like the fiscal framework. It wishes that it was not necessary, because it would prefer different constitutional arrangements from the rest of us. However, both John Swinney in 2016 and Shona Robison in 2023 have rightly accepted that, under the current constitutional arrangements, they have a duty—and it is a duty—to ensure that Scotland gets the best deal. It is vitally important that both Governments do everything that they can to protect Scottish finance, particularly in these tough economic times.
The new framework, which was signed on 2 August, will do exactly that in a way that is better than the way that the 2016 model operated. Despite the fact that most economists believed that the latter served Scotland pretty well, it was clearly out of date, particularly as a result of inflationary pressures. The new model is better because it is gross domestic product deflator protected, it has provided greater flexibility to the Scottish Government on existing borrowing power, and it has taken into account the damaging consequences of exogenous shocks to the system. Those are all changes that the Scottish Government was rightly calling for, and it is good to see that they have been made.