Meeting of the Parliament 11 March 2025
I will not take a lecture on tax from the Conservatives, who placed the highest tax burden on working people in more than a generation. The issue has been well debated in the chamber. If Mr Kerr’s party had made different decisions, we would be in a very different place and the £5.2 billion funding for Scotland would not, in fact, be available.
I said at the outset that I feel that the Scottish Government’s motion is fundamentally unserious. The Scottish Government wants to pretend that the new UK Labour Government has done absolutely no work to begin to tackle the issues and to look at them in a serious way and in detail. We must take a moment to reflect on the actions that have been taken. We should all welcome the UK Labour Government’s recent announcement that it is expanding the £150 warm home discount scheme, so that 220,000 more Scottish households will receive help to reduce their energy costs. That scheme provides energy bill support to the people who are most in need. The result of that UK Labour Government intervention is that one in every five families in Scotland is now eligible for help with their bill. That is a total of 500,000 households.
The UK Government is not just expanding that lifeline scheme; it is also delivering an extra £41 million, through consequentials, to the household support fund, to provide support. The cabinet secretary and I have had many debates about that, because it took quite some time to understand what the Scottish Government’s plans were for those Barnett consequentials and the difference that they can make in supporting people in Scotland.
I have already mentioned in my exchange with Stephen Kerr the £5.2 billion that was allocated to the Scottish budget at UK level, which has sought to end what was, quite frankly, a period of Conservative decline and inaction.