Meeting of the Parliament 11 December 2024
We think that the position that we have put forward is balanced and affordable and focuses on hospitality. We will continue to have discussions on that, but any money that we put into the budget for rates relief will have to be baked in. No money will be allocated by the UK Government for rates relief next year, because it is changing its business taxation system. The UK Government’s scheme will be entirely self-funding from higher-rate properties, and we cannot replicate that in Scotland, because we do not have the same number of higher-value properties as the UK has. Whatever we do this year will be baked in—we need to bear that in mind.
The environment is also not exempt from the Tories’ ire. The budget will deliver £4.9 billion of positive climate spending, from spending on public transport through to nature investment. The Tories say that they want to merge various environmental agencies, but they have failed to spell out which ones they would merge and why that would be beneficial. They have said that the budget should not pass, but they ignore the economic opportunity that investing in offshore wind will bring to Scotland.
Although Christmas is just around the corner, the letter that we received recently from Russell Findlay would have made Scrooge blush. In that letter and in the motion for debate, there is a call for tax cuts that the Tories’ estimates suggest would slash public investment by £1 billion—take note, Alexander Stewart. Russell Findlay has said that the cuts that he proposes in his letter are “fully costed”, yet the Tories have never produced a breakdown of the costs that would allow them to be scrutinised. Perhaps Craig Hoy will publish that today.
The Tories talk of cuts to social security but refuse to say what benefits they would cut. Perhaps I can clear up the scale of the cuts that the Tories are calling for: £1 billion is more than the total cost of adult disability living allowance and the Scottish child payment—their combined cost is about £877 million. If the Tories are claiming that they would not cut those benefits, what welfare support do they want to cut? It is time for them to come clean with the detail.
Not content with that, they appear to have a new front in Russell Findlay’s bargain-basement attempt at starting a culture war. This time it is babies. Clearly, Russell Findlay thinks that babies are a left-wing cabal who are living on handouts and have had it too good for too long. Now, he wants to scrap the baby box. It appears that all the work to try to stop being the nasty party might have been in vain.