Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 25 February 2021
The Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy and Tourism made that point, and I made the point back to him that that is a question of choice, given the additional funding that the Scottish Government has received from the UK Government over the past year.
The convergence money, which was hard won by the industry and the Scottish Conservatives, has been dipped into to top up the budget for the less favoured area support scheme. That involved taking money from one part of the sector and giving it away to another, in a move that NFU Scotland described as the Scottish Government “short-changing” the farming sector.
In all of this, what the sector really needs is a sense of direction and evidence that there is a strategy for the medium term, that ministers know where they are going and that the desired priorities of today will be linked to the delivered priorities of tomorrow. This budget is a missed opportunity for that.
Despite the challenges, this is—as Murdo Fraser rightly reminded us—the largest budget that any Scottish Government has ever had at its disposal. Hundreds of millions of pounds in support have found their way to this Parliament to allocate, and we have seen further unprecedented sums through programmes such as the job retention scheme directly supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is a budget that would have been impossible without the security of being part of the United Kingdom.
It should be a budget that shows ambition and sets a path for the time ahead and the challenges that we face, but instead it is a budget that falls short and finds this SNP Government wanting when businesses and working people in rural Scotland need help most.
15:45