Meeting of the Parliament 16 December 2015
Let me work my way through the different issues that Willie Rennie has raised. First of all, on mental health, there is an additional £50 million in the budget for mental health, bringing the total to £150 million. I hope that Mr Rennie will welcome that.
On the point about employment, perhaps Mr Rennie was not looking at this morning’s data, but employment in Scotland is at 74.3 per cent, or 10,000 higher than a year ago. That is higher than the employment rate in the rest of the United Kingdom, and I would have thought that Mr Rennie would welcome that.
Moreover, I point out that, despite all that Mr Rennie has said about the police and his demands that we take action, we have protected the police budget with a real-terms increase, and I have put in resources to ensure that the police can deal with some of the challenges that are facing them. Is Mr Rennie so grudging that he cannot applaud the decisions that the Government has taken? We could have spent the money on something else, and Mr Rennie would have been here, demanding more money for the police. His approach, I think, lacks a bit of credibility.
Finally, I took care and a substantial amount of time in my statement to explain the rationale behind the decision on tax. The SRIT powers are so constrained that we cannot increase tax on people earning high levels of income without increasing it for people on low incomes. I have sat in this Parliament for years, being lectured by the Liberal Democrats on the importance of protecting people on low incomes. I have just done that, and I had thought that in doing so I might have got a bit of encouragement from Mr Rennie.
I have said to Parliament that, subject to our getting a satisfactory agreement on the fiscal framework that will give us greater clarity on the size of the budget in the years to come—after all, a material point that we all have to wrestle with is that the fiscal framework could vary the amount of money that we have available at our hand and under our control in this Parliament—I will come back to Parliament before the end of the parliamentary session and set out our longer-term intentions on the exercise of the tax powers. We will do all those things, and I hope that, if Mr Rennie is feeling more charitable when the day comes, he will give them a better welcome.