Meeting of the Parliament 18 June 2025
I will gladly give to John Mason the two papers that I have that detail everything that we can do to cut the horrendous waste across the Scottish public sector.
We need to do more work to dismantle the SNP’s secretive and inefficient client state. We would remove the smoke and mirrors around public sector decision making by extending lobbying laws to organisations that are funded by SNP ministers just to tell them what they want to hear. We would also create a new accountability and transparency dashboard, which would provide clear information about how taxpayers’ money is spent and who signed it off.
There are two sorts of SNP waste—the sort that, rightly, angers people, and the sort that, rightly and roundly, outrages them. Take the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care’s use of a taxpayer-funded limousine to meet his friends in the pub for a pre-match pint prior to going to the football. It is to Neil Gray’s discredit that he has not resigned, but it is to the public’s dismay that John Swinney has not sacked him. Such is the level of SNP contempt for hard-pressed taxpayers that that kind of behaviour goes unchecked in SNP Scotland.
The SNP says that it will change, but the past is the best guide to the future. The SNP’s credit score with the country is seriously impaired. A billion pounds has been wasted on Barlinnie prison, which was meant to cost just £100 million; £500 million has been wasted on two out-of-date ferries; £50 million has been wasted on malicious prosecutions; and £30 million has been wasted on a national care service that was scrapped before it even started. That is the reality of the SNP’s casual disregard for taxpayers’ money.
In contrast, we would deliver tax cuts for workers, wage a war on waste right across government, and tackle head-on the SNP’s bloated client state.
Those are the policies, based on sound, common-sense Conservative values, that Scotland so badly needs. Sadly, it will never get them from the SNP Government.
I move,
That the Parliament notes that the Scottish Government’s failure to grow Scotland’s economy has led to an economic performance gap worth £1.1 billion in 2025-26 alone; believes that there should be a crackdown on wasteful expenditure from the Scottish Government through the tightening of spending rules in the Scottish Public Finance Manual, reducing the number of highly paid senior executives within the public sector, and reversing the recent ministerial pay rise, and calls on the Scottish Government to use the proceeds of a crackdown on waste to cut income tax by up to £444 for every person in Scotland by abolishing the 20% and 21% rates of income tax, so that everyone earning up to £43,662 pays 19p for every £1 earned.
14:59