Meeting of the Parliament 18 June 2025
I have a lot of waste to identify, so I will give way later if I can.
The SNP is costing Scotland £1 billion a year in lost growth and countless billions more through incompetence and waste. The SNP Government boasts that its so-called progressive taxation—a system that taxes nurses and teachers more—is bringing in £1.7 billion a year, but the Scottish Fiscal Commission estimates that there is an economic performance gap between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom of £1.1 billion in this year alone. We know what is really going on: the impact of the SNP’s tax rises on Scots feel very real indeed, but the benefits are simply another SNP false promise.
That missing billion, in black and white, is the true cost of John Swinney. The Fiscal Commission is being characteristically diplomatic in describing it as an “economic performance gap”. I call it the deep and corrosive economic effect of 18 years of an anti-growth, anti-business SNP Government.
Every independent forecaster, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the SFC and the Fraser of Allander Institute, warns that the SNP Government cannot continue on the fiscal and spending path that it is on. A benefits bill that is set to soar to £10 billion by the end of the year is £2 billion more than the Government can afford. The number of senior civil servants is soaring, and quango after quango is spewing out bizarre and costly recommendations and regulations. John Swinney’s high-tax, low-growth Scotland simply cannot continue. That means taking the SNP’s client state head on.
When we brought forward our fully costed plans for tax cuts this year, Shona Robison said that they would be impossible. However, on Monday, John Swinney finally admitted that she has got it wrong, announcing that, this week, the SNP Government will reveal £1 billion of SNP waste that the SNP itself has identified. However, when the SNP talks of public sector reform, we do not expect much action.
We would deliver it, however. We would reduce the size of the civil service back to pre-2016 levels within five years. We would introduce a new taxpayer savings act to cut the number of quangos by a quarter, through closing down and merging unnecessary bodies such as the Scottish Land Commission and Community Justice Scotland and creating a Scottish agency of value and efficiency—SAVE—a short-term, business-led body that is designed to mount a war on waste to claw back £500 million of misspent public money. We would introduce tighter public spending rules that would clamp down on the frivolous use of taxpayers’ money and introduce sanctions on individuals who breach those rules. We would apply a zero-based accounting system to the annual budgetary process of the Scottish Government, and we would go on to reduce red tape on public services such as the national health service by reducing their statutory reporting requirements. We would also slash the cost of government, making efficiencies in public relations and human resources departments. That would mean more doctors, fewer spin doctors and more shared service hubs across government.
We would make sure that every public sector worker is focused on delivering for taxpayers. We would ban woke roles in equality, diversity and inclusion. We would end once and for all the Scottish Government’s obsession with gender issues, and ban the production of all non-statutory guidance that relates to gender identity or trans issues across the public sector.