Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2026 [Last updated 19:16]
I am pleased to speak to the amendment in my name, in which we set out very clearly, as we did in the election campaign just a few short weeks ago, that Labour believes that our public services are in need of widespread, root-and-branch reform.
We believe that the shape of the Scottish state needs to adapt to the reality of three accelerating major trends that our citizens are living with every day: demographic change, technological change and climate change. Where the change that the Government leads meets the core principles that we have laid out in our amendment, we will work with it constructively to deliver on it.
However, I have to say at the outset that the Scottish National Party’s £4.7 billion fiscal gap will loom large in today’s debate in two significant ways. The cabinet secretary said that every pound that is saved can be reinvested in other purposes. I am not sure that I entirely agree. Most pounds that are saved will be used to close the £4.7 billion gap between the Government’s spending plans and what it can afford—between the spending trajectory that the cabinet secretary has set, along with his colleagues, and the amount of money that has been identified by the Scottish Fiscal Commission. That gap has led to three emergency budgets from the Government in the past four years. SNP members are late converts—principally on that basis—to the need for reform.
Using that gap as the animating principle of this programme is a dangerous place to start, because it can lead to the wrong decisions, driven by the greatest short-term savings rather than long-term efficiency or a vision of where the state might go. What we require is a sense of destination. What is the Government’s vision of a modernised Scottish state for the third quarter of the 21st century? I have never heard that, let alone seen it described.
Ivan McKee rose—