Meeting of the Parliament 31 October 2018
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
I absolutely do not accept Mr Fraser’s assessment. I say with respect to Mr Fraser that to refer to financial transactions funding as if those funds can be deployed to support resource budgets for ferry services is to mislead the chamber. He ought to consider his own remarks.
The resource budget has been reduced by £1.9 billion relative to the 2010-11 budget. We should not forget, either, that Mr Greene’s party’s tax proposals for the current year would have reduced Scotland’s resource budget by a further £500 million relative to our tax proposals. I presume that Mr Fraser disputes that, too. Mr Greene accused me of cheek; in return—I will be diplomatic and polite—I accuse him of extensive brass neck in his approach to the resourcing of our ferry services.
Since assuming responsibility for the ferries brief this summer, I have been committed to engaging with all our stakeholders to ensure that their views are understood as we have those discussions. Mr Greene might like to let me know on how many occasions the Conservative Party has asked for additional funding in Scottish Government budget rounds since we took office in 2007.
I would like to reflect briefly on our activity to date. We published our ferries plan in 2012. That was an ambitious long-term strategy for investment in ferries. Despite the Tories’ age of austerity, we have invested more than £1.4 billion in supporting lifeline ferry services across the network.