Meeting of the Parliament 07 May 2025
I do not disagree at all with that point from the Deputy First Minister. If Labour had signalled in advance of the election what it was going to do, whether on national insurance, the farmers tax or cutting the winter fuel payments, people might have been happier to live with that, but none of that was promised in advance of the election. No wonder people are so angry.
It is no surprise that the growth forecasts for the UK economy have been substantially downgraded in the period since Labour came to power and since Rachel Reeves’s budget.
That said, we cannot exempt the Scottish National Party Government from criticism, as I am sure the Deputy First Minister would expect. At the business in the Parliament conference the week before last, there were questions about matters that are under the Scottish Government’s control, including taxation, business rates and the fact that Barnett consequentials from reductions in rates for hospitality, retail and leisure south of the border have not been passed on for three years in succession. We had questions about skills, apprenticeships and housing, which are all matters of interest to business and are all areas where economic growth is being held back, and all of them are in the devolved space.
On Friday, I spoke at a tourism conference where we heard from VisitScotland that, while international visitor numbers are doing well, there is a significant decline in the domestic market. That is at a time when the tourism sector is struggling with business rates, the national insurance increase, the regulation of short-term lets and, of course, the coming visitor levy.
The Scottish Government can make choices on the great majority of those things, but the choices that it has made so far have been to lump on additional regulation and taxation in sectors that are now struggling. That is not how we grow the economy. At the same time, previous SNP decisions on rent controls have resulted in the loss of what is estimated to be in excess of £3 billion of investment in the build-to-rent sector.