Meeting of the Parliament 27 September 2022
I am grateful for that comment, because that was broadly my point. It is also worth noting that the contribution of the European Union towards our net migration had been falling, largely because central and eastern European countries had been getting wealthier.
We will support the Government motion. In some ways, I would like to support the Conservative amendment, because it raises some important points about the nuances and challenges that we face. Ultimately, however, I do not think that we can accept the obliteration of all the points that the motion makes about inward migration. We are supportive of the sentiments in the amendment but will not support it in the division.
We have to bear in mind two critically important contexts when facing this. First, Scotland has a deep productivity challenge that goes beyond just demographics. That is set out very clearly in the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s most recent work, which shows that the wage and employment growth of every single region of Scotland is slower than the UK average. Indeed, Scotland’s employment and wage growth is not only slower than the UK average but slower than that of regions that we would expect to be our rough peers, such as the midlands, the south-west and the north-west. That is not only to do with oil and gas. That is a significant part of the issue, but the regional breakdown shows that the south-east of Scotland also underperforms, and that is an area that is more connected to professional services and tourism than it is to oil and gas. We have to understand that challenge and the importance of growing tax revenues per capita, because that is the fundamental basis of the fiscal framework. Frankly, even without the fiscal framework, that is a critical measure of the health of our public finances.
The more fundamental point in context, however, is that world demographics are inescapable. In the past 50 years, world population growth has halved. It will halve again by the middle of this century and, by the end of the 21st century, world population will be declining.
The fundamental point is therefore that to think that we can solve these problems by attracting people from overseas and by importing our labour is simply not sustainable. We absolutely must mitigate that and try to attract people. However, ultimately, we cannot import our way out of this problem. Indeed, we must rethink our understandings of human capital and how we seek to build our workforce. It is a mistake to continue with a model that seeks to import cheap labour and sustain the economy in that way.
We need to realise that human capital is precious and finite. With that realisation, a number of things follow.