Meeting of the Parliament 26 November 2025
I do have concerns about the legal issues. However, as the Presiding Officer said, all legislation that is passed in this place will ultimately face the scrutiny of the courts. What I am more concerned about is the Scottish taxpayer having to foot a £350 million bill for a mistake of the Scottish Government’s making. That is the consequence of our not passing this legislation.
Costly mistakes from this Government are becoming all too familiar. A billion pounds has been spent on ferries that still do not sail, another billion has been spent on a prison that was supposed to cost £100 million, and millions more have been wasted on legal fees defending the SNP Government’s incompetence—and I hope that there will be no more legal fees as a result of this other mistake.
Failure and mismanagement have already drained billions of pounds of public money. It is fortunate that, this time, someone eventually did their homework, because the country is well past the point at which it can afford to keep paying for the Government’s errors.
Even though it appears that the issue was caught in time, there may yet be hidden costs for local authorities, such as for legal and financial advice to protect themselves from exposure as collection agents. Like Mr Hoy, I would like a reassurance that hard-pressed councils will not be expected to bear any burden for a blunder that was not of their making. Given the minister’s response to my intervention, I am still not clear whether any debt recovery action that has commenced in the past few days—or could potentially commence in the coming weeks—will be sound or whether it could potentially have legal costs attached to it.
The Government will be well aware that we are approaching a moment when the Scottish people will have the opportunity to hold it accountable. Its record on finances and taxation is woeful. We face a looming fiscal gap and, even with this legislative fix, the non-domestic rates system is not functioning as it should. It is a complex labyrinth of exemptions and reliefs—and that may well have been what allowed the error to go undetected for so long.
It is not only in financial legislation that the Government falters. Only last week, we were summoned to the chamber to consider a phantom heat in buildings bill, only for the Government to admit that it had no intention of introducing such a bill. Those are not the actions of a Government with a clear plan; they are the actions of a Government that has run out of ideas and is rapidly running out of time.
As I have said, we will support the bill, if only to ensure that the Scottish people do not pick up the tab for that mistake. We know that when Governments get it wrong, ordinary people end up paying the price, and we firmly believe that public services should never have to absorb the cost of financial or legal incompetence from a Government here that, increasingly, looks and sounds completely knackered.