Meeting of the Parliament 07 January 2025
If Mr Swinney allows me to make a little progress, I will allow him back in.
The point that I was moving on to make is about the length of time that we have spent looking at the issues. The Government has set its motion in the context of the budget. For many months, the First Minister and his front bench sought to project the budget as though it was the first budget of a new Government. However, in 2025, we enter the 18th year of the SNP Government being in power. Indeed, the current First Minister started passing budgets when I had not long left secondary school. He has had those wide-ranging levers of power for almost two decades, including as finance secretary, as education secretary and as Deputy First Minister before he came to the office that he now holds.
We must consider that, despite the three First Ministers in my short time in this Parliament and four across the SNP’s almost 20 years in Government all stating that child poverty is the top priority, the most recent estimates show that 30,000 more children are in poverty now compared with when the SNP came to power in 2007.
On the First Minister’s point about the legally binding targets, alarm bells are ringing with regard to where he has had the power to make changes. Indeed, in its report last year, the Poverty and Inequality Commission said that progress has been
“slow or not evident at all”
and it predicted that it is now
“improbable”
that those legally binding child poverty targets will be met.
We must reflect on that, because we are almost at the 20-year mark of the SNP having the levers that I spoke about. We have to be honest: one budget is not going to provide the change of approach and direction that is required to meet the scale of the challenge before us.
I put on record Scottish Labour’s pride in and clear support for the UK Labour Government’s ending the era of austerity and ensuring that there is additional money coming to the Scottish Government. The investment of £5 billion into the Scottish Government’s budget is vitally important and should be recognised. I am disappointed that the Scottish Government did not see fit to recognise that in its motion.
There have also been other welcome down payments on tackling child poverty at a UK level, which I will speak about after I have taken an intervention from the First Minister.