Meeting of the Parliament 21 February 2018
The figure that Mr FitzPatrick needs to keep in his head is £16.5 billion. That is the cost to the Scottish economy of SNP failure. For the past 15 years, the SNP has failed to grow our economy at the same rate as that of the UK. If the SNP grew the economy, it would have more money to spend.
The cabinet secretary seems able to find money when he needs to. To do his deal with the Greens—to provide Patrick’s pocket money—he found an extra £110 million from underspend and reserves. Of that, £40 million comes from reserves and £70 million comes from underspends. That is curious because, when the finance secretary came to the Finance and Constitution Committee on 15 January, I quizzed him about how much money was available in that area of the budget. The figure in the draft budget for “Budget Exchange/Reserve” was stated as £158 million. In response to me, the cabinet secretary said:
“In the past, finance secretaries may have been able to hold on to that money for financial management reasons, for example. I have used the money up front for the purposes of budget negotiations. The figure is what it is because there is very tight financial management, and that is the figure that officials think is most appropriate”.—[Official Report, Finance and Constitution Committee, 15 January 2018; c 32.]
Yet, when the budget bill was presented to Parliament on 31 January—12 working days later—that figure of £158 million had gone up by £110 million. That is a 70 per cent increase in 12 working days. It is perfectly clear that the cabinet secretary had that squirrelled away to do a deal with the Greens, but he did not tell Parliament or its committees about it.
There is a serious point about our ability as a Parliament to conduct budget scrutiny. In the 12 working days between giving evidence to the Finance and Constitution Committee and presenting his budget bill, the finance secretary found an additional £110 million. It is not unreasonable to suggest that he knew perfectly well about that money when he came to the Finance and Constitution Committee. Had members of that committee, or indeed members of the subject committees that were conducting budget scrutiny, been made aware of those additional resources, much more meaningful discussions could have taken place about how the budget might have been improved. However, the finance secretary chose not to disclose that.
There is a serious point. We need a new approach in the future. The Parliament and its committees need to be much clearer about exactly how much money is in the budget, and as we look at implementing the recommendations of the budget review group, I hope that that question can be addressed.
I return to the key messages in the budget. What the budget does not do is address the woeful situation that we now have in the Scottish economy. Today, we learned that Scottish employment is now lower than the UK average and that economic inactivity and unemployment are higher than the UK average.
The Scottish Fiscal Commission has given us its prediction that the SNP-run economy in Scotland will fail to match UK growth in each of the next five years. In 2018, it will grow at half the rate of the economy of the UK as a whole, and it is projected to have the lowest growth of any major economy in the next three years—the lowest in the EU, the lowest in the G20 and the lowest among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.