Meeting of the Parliament 28 January 2025
Precisely. Our rural areas need that kind of support, as my colleague Edward Mountain has been calling for, and as I know that Fergus Ewing has also been calling for. Instead, we get one-size-fits-all, central belt-focused solutions from the SNP.
Members should make no mistake: the projected spend in welfare is simply unsustainable. As Audit Scotland warns, so too is the cost of Scotland’s bloated public sector. Spending on workforce pay, pensions and national insurance contributions will swallow up 53.4 per cent of the entire Scottish resource budget this year alone.
The cabinet secretary will no doubt hide cynically behind the increased pay for front-line workers in schools and hospitals. We welcome the efforts of those staff and we thank them, and their contributions are rightly rewarded. However, while everyone else is being told to tighten their belts, it is simply breathtaking hypocrisy on the part of ministers that we discover today—of all days—that the number of senior civil servants is still soaring.
Data obtained by the Scottish Conservatives reveals that the core civil service wage bill has risen by £42 million in the past two and a half years. That is over and above the annual salary increases. In 2022, the number of top-brass, grade-C civil servants stood at 2,278. By last year, that number had leapt to 2,776—a staggering 20 per cent increase in the number of senior civil servants in just two years. When the Minister for Public Finance sums up, I challenge him to explain to the public why this Government needs 500 more senior civil servants today than it did less than three years ago.
This is a budget full of misplaced priorities.