Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 February 2022
Once again, the minister refuses to say what she thinks would be an acceptable limit.
It is not clear what the workplace parking tax is meant to achieve. If it is meant to persuade people to use public transport, public transport first needs to improve. We know that the SNP is no good when it comes to running things. When it runs the ferries, islanders are left stranded. Now it wants to run the trains, but cannot tell us what it wants to do with them, apart from cut services and increase fares. From nat sail to nat rail, it all adds up to a big nat fail.
That is what happens when you give the Greens influence or—even worse—bring them into Government. A party that wants to take us back to the stone age has two Government ministers. It is like having the Flintstones around the Cabinet table, with Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater as Fred and Wilma.
The tax will hit workers. We have seen that in Nottingham, where more than half of affected employers pass on the cost to their staff. However, when we tried to exempt groups including the police, the fire brigade, ambulance staff, teachers, shift workers and people who live or work nowhere near public transport, the SNP and the Greens blocked that. Yesterday, Ms Gilruth refused to do anything about those sectors, and confirmed to Liam Kerr that the Government has done no modelling on what effect the hated workplace parking tax might have. It is her rather strange view that we do modelling only once something is already in place.