Meeting of the Parliament 31 January 2018
It is dead simple. We would cut out the waste and the vanity projects and we would grow the Scottish economy. That is what the SNP should be doing.
At the same time as taxes are going up, people across Scotland are seeing their services cut. Notwithstanding what we heard today about the financial settlement for local government, councils across Scotland are still having to make service cuts: reducing classroom assistants, scrapping school-crossing patrollers, reducing services for children with disabilities, reducing services for older people, and reducing waste collections, all as a result of the choices that are being made by this SNP Government.
The budget cuts spending on motorways and trunk roads by £136 million. That might be good news to Patrick Harvie’s ears, but it is not what businesses and motorists across Scotland want to hear. The budget also cuts by more than half—a reduction of £76 million—the spend on digital connectivity, which is supposedly a key priority for this Government.
It did not need to be like this, because the Westminster block grant is up in real terms compared with the previous year’s, according to both the Scottish Parliament information centre and the Fraser of Allander institute. The SNP does not want to listen to the experts—to those who know. Indeed, at the Finance and Constitution Committee just two weeks ago, the finance secretary accepted that the block grant for discretionary spending is increasing over the next two years.
Derek Mackay rose—