Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 25 February 2021
At the outset of my brief remarks, I commend the finance secretary, Kate Forbes, for her very consensual approach to the setting of this year’s budget. Such a consensual approach is entirely fitting in these unprecedented times and properly reflects the very difficult year that the people of Scotland have endured, and the difficult months that lie ahead as our economy takes steps on the road to recovery and sustainable renewal. I am very pleased to note that discussions on a pay increase for social care workers are on-going, for those people are indeed angels—every one of them.
The budget set forth includes a significant number of very important initiatives, including support for public sector workers and business. In the short time available, I will highlight a few initiatives that will make a real difference to the lives of my Cowdenbeath constituents.
I very much welcome the additional £125 million to help young people, those who have been made redundant and the long-term unemployed. That includes £70 million to support the young persons guarantee, which is a key Scottish Government intervention to help young people find work, training or educational opportunity. Given the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the younger generation, it is absolutely vital that all of us do everything that we can to help young people through to the other side of the pandemic and ensure that they are not left behind.
On those who have lost their jobs, an additional £35 million is being made available for skills and retraining, including for the national transition training fund, which specifically supports people who are unemployed or at risk of redundancy further to the pandemic. A further £20 million is to be made available to support the longer-term unemployed.
Another area of spending that will be of particular importance to my Cowdenbeath constituents is the commitment to spend £182 million to close the attainment gap. Each child in my Cowdenbeath constituency deserves the same life chances and opportunities as every other child in Scotland, and it is to the credit of the SNP Scottish Government that it is determined to make that a reality.
Housing is of course an important issue in my Cowdenbeath constituency, as it is across Scotland. The SNP Scottish Government’s planned investment of more than £3.5 billion over the next five years is very welcome news indeed.
The £90 million that the SNP Scottish Government is making available to support a further council tax freeze is very welcome and good news for households in Fife, where we hear that Fife Council has frozen council tax for the financial year 2021-22, in the light of that additional funding that is being made available to it.
It would be remiss of me not to place the Scottish Government budget in the context in which it sits, which is regrettably that it cannot take account of all of Scotland’s resources and it cannot reflect in all aspects the priorities of the people of Scotland. Rather, we can only plead with the UK Tory Government in London—a Government that we in Scotland did not vote for—to, for example, extend the furlough scheme, make the universal credit uplift permanent or request that a return to Westminster austerity politics is rejected.
Power over our resources continues to lie with Westminster, which retains the key economic levers that every other normal independent country takes for granted. What rational person hands over their money to a neighbour and gives them absolute power, without a veto, over how it is spent? Scotland has been in that condition for too long, and independence is coming.
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