Meeting of the Parliament 19 February 2026 [Draft]
Rule 9.16.7 of the standing orders dictates that the Parliament must agree to a Scottish rate resolution before stage 3 proceedings for the budget bill can begin. As such, Scottish Labour will support the rate resolution. The late UK budget has made the timetable for this year’s Scottish budget challenging and put pressure on our parliamentary procedures. We will not stand in the way of the necessary mechanisms that will ensure that our police officers, nurses and local services continue to be funded at the start of the new financial year in only a few short weeks.
However, over the next few months, we all know what will happen. We know that the SNP’s deeply underwhelming budget will not last the year. Independent experts from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Fraser of Allander Institute are unanimous in their view that yet another emergency budget from whoever forms a Government in May is now a racing certainty.
The SNP continues to budget on a wing and a prayer, hoping that something comes along to bail it out once again. These are the hallmarks of 19 years of John Swinney budgets: creative accounting, financial sleight of hand and swingeing cuts to local government.
The SNP has received an additional £10.3 billion for Scotland’s budget from the UK Labour Government, and Scots will rightly be asking the SNP where the money has gone. The truth is that the SNP has decimated Scotland’s public finances and taken treasured public services such as our NHS to the brink. Our NHS is in crisis, with more people in Dundee waiting more than two years for treatment than in the whole of England. We have ferries that do not sail, roads that do not get dualled and schools that do not get built. It is a record of SNP failure and incompetence. We have a justice system past breaking point, with rising crime and overcrowded jails. We have a rotten culture of secrecy, in which the SNP circles the wagons to protect its own instead of serving the people whom it is supposed to represent. This SNP budget changes none of that.