Meeting of the Parliament 28 January 2025
We have not rejected all means. We have taken responsibility here in Scotland and raised revenue through our more progressive income tax policy, which means that we have more than £1.7 billion available to us that we would not have had otherwise. There were choices available to Michael Marra’s colleagues in Whitehall that they chose not to take. Instead, they took an approach that is an attack on jobs and an attack on growth and is going to hammer our public services here in Scotland. Michael Marra should stand up to the Westminster Government for taking that approach.
We have called on the UK Government to fully fund those costs. However, the Treasury plans to provide us with a much lower Barnett share, which is likely to leave us some £300 million short, as it fails to take account of the fact that we have a larger public sector per person than other parts of the UK. It feels as though Scotland is now being punished for having decided to employ more people in the public sector and to invest in key public services.
We have a range of public sector employers, including the national health service, the police and local authorities, which urgently need clarity on this to inform their spending decisions from April. It is therefore essential that the Treasury fully funds those additional costs for Scotland’s public sector, rather than just giving a much lower-value Barnett share of the spending in England. It would be completely unacceptable for our public services to suffer as a result of that change in reserved taxation.
Turning to what the 2025-26 Scottish budget will deliver for Scotland’s public services, I begin with my own portfolio of health and social care. Our health and care services are an essential pillar of our public services, and will be supported next year with record investment of £21.7 billion. That includes £16.2 billion for health boards, representing a 3 per cent cash uplift and a real-terms increase on their baseline funding—boards’ resource funding, which has more than doubled since 2006-07. It also includes £139 million of additional investment across NHS infrastructure to support improvement and renewal.
The 2025-26 Scottish budget also contains £200 million to reduce waiting lists and increase capacity, including to help support the reduction of delayed discharge, supporting recovery initiatives such as frailty units and expanding the hospital at home programme to ensure that, by March 2026, no one will wait more than 12 months for a new out-patient appointment or day-case treatment.
With that investment, we are working closely with health boards to support the implementation of alternative pathways and initiatives to support people being seen more quickly and to increase capacity to ensure sustainability.
The budget also provides £2.2 billion of investment in primary care. That investment will deliver essential reform, improve capacity and patient access in local communities and reduce demand on acute services.
The budget delivers on our programme for government commitments for health, with £125 million to fund the real living wage for our adult social care workers, £5 million to provide short breaks for carers and more than £13 million to support growth in the independent living fund. It supports spending by the Scottish Government and NHS boards of £1.3 billion for mental health services, more than doubling direct programme investment since 2020-21—