Meeting of the Parliament 21 February 2018
As, I think, Murdo Fraser said,
“Another day, another budget debate.”
It is certainly another day and another opportunity for the Conservative Party to conveniently forget that, during the first minority Government session of Parliament, it voted through budget after budget after budget. Every year, in fact, the Conservative Party voted for the SNP’s budget. It negotiated and tried to get policy changes. However, during those years, it never quite managed a policy change on anything like the scale of that which the Greens have achieved over the past two years. I have to admit that I am glad that the Conservative Party has decided to stop negotiating properly. We might well be seeing much worse budgets if the Conservative Party was still negotiating and trying to get policy change out of the Scottish Government, as it used to.
Nevertheless, I remain disappointed that the progressive political parties across the chamber are not attempting to get change in the Scottish budget. It might well reduce my negotiating hand if other parties engaged constructively in that process, but I suspect that the outcome as a whole would be better. To those who made proposals at the very last minute—too late even for the Scottish Fiscal Commission to examine them—I say that the process needs to be better in the future.
As a result of the negotiating process that we engaged in with the Scottish Government, we have significant change—and not only in relation to the smaller-scale measures. There is the additional fund that the finance secretary mentioned that will enable communities to make their own proposals on rail improvements, which I am glad to see will happen sooner than expected. There is the extra money to accelerate the designation of marine protected areas to protect our marine environment. There is the long-term shift away from high-carbon investment to low-carbon investment, and there is an improvement in the public sector pay settlement. There is also the substantial reversal in the cuts to local government funding.
Is the situation for local government perfect? Of course not. Does this budget relieve local government of every pressure that it faces? Of course not. However, there is a real-terms increase in Scottish Government funding for local government, and that is an important step forward.
I see that Monica Lennon is looking to intervene.