Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 27 April 2022
It was around two months ago when we discussed the UK shared prosperity fund in the chamber, and I am delighted that the Government has chosen to give more time to consider the implications of the fund for Scotland’s economy.
A substantial number of questions remain unanswered on record as to what would replace the structural funds, including whether the replacement would be as comprehensive as the previous EU funds and the extent to which Scotland would benefit from the new shared prosperity fund.
Over the past five years, we have been assured on numerous occasions that the UK fund would at least match the level of EU funds that it is replacing. Indeed, I remember that the Conservative amendment in the debate in March stated just that. I note that that has been dropped from today’s Conservative amendment, and I wonder whether that is a tacit admission of what we all now know to be a matter of fact: the UK shared prosperity fund is worth less to Scotland’s economy than the European structural and investment funds that it purports to replace.
It does not surprise me that the Conservatives are unwilling to admit that its replacement fund is miserly in comparison with EU funds. I am not the only person asserting that. As we have heard already, the Scottish Government believes it to be significantly less than EU structural funds. The Welsh Government agrees, as do the Northern Ireland Executive and the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. In fact, the Westminster Treasury Committee, which is chaired by a Conservative member—a former Treasury minister—stated that the shared prosperity fund is 40 per cent less than the EU funds that it is replacing and questioned why one of the centrepieces of the UK Government’s levelling up ambitions was to be reduced to such an extent.
We completely agree with the Scottish Government motion when it states that the UK Government should
“immediately increase the value of the fund to at least the level provided”
by the EU structural and investment funds.
We are in the middle of a cost of living crisis, a climate crisis and a productivity crisis. We have had more than a decade of austerity, and communities across the country are truly struggling as Britain undergoes the sharpest fall in living standards in my lifetime. People are struggling to put food on the table and to find money to feed their electricity meters. Families are generally struggling to make ends meet. I despair at the hardship that millions of families are facing across the country. We see gross inequalities in our communities every day in our inboxes and in our constituency surgeries.
One in four children is living in poverty, and almost a quarter of all households are living in fuel poverty, which is a figure that is rising exponentially by the day.