Meeting of the Parliament 10 December 2025
I am running out of time.
If that decision does not sum up the SNP Government’s high-tax, high-welfare approach to government, I do not know what does.
Having spent years complaining about the previous UK Government’s approach to benefits, the SNP is now discovering that it is not as easy as it looks. In 2017, the estimated cost of setting up the Scottish Government’s in-house benefits agency, Social Security Scotland, was £300 million and, by 2023, that had blossomed to £700 million.
The Government refuses to learn any lessons and, judging by Shirley-Anne Somerville’s amendment, that will not change any time soon. The amendment not only ignores the £2 billion spending gap, but calls for the UK Labour Government to increase the UK’s benefits bill even further.
The Labour amendment at least acknowledges the funding gap that exists. However, it also celebrates Labour’s decision to remove the two-child limit by increasing taxes on working people. We therefore cannot support the amendment.
Scotland’s benefits system should be an essential safety net for those who need assistance. We can all agree on that principle. The Scottish Conservatives believe that this system must be fair and affordable. We must ensure that the spiralling costs are not balanced on the backs of hard-working Scottish taxpayers. That is where we differ from all other parties in the chamber, because the left-wing consensus does not want to accept those principles. The scale of the problem is such that it is too big for the SNP Government to ignore. Instead of burying its head in the sand, this is the time for the Government to be honest with Scottish taxpayers about how it will fix the mess that it has created.
I move,
That the Parliament believes that social security spending by the Scottish Government and its future social security spending commitments are unsustainable; notes the report published by Audit Scotland in September 2025, Adult Disability Payment; further notes that the Audit Scotland report highlights a “funding gap for devolved social security spending of £2.0 billion by 2029/30”; calls on the Scottish Government to explain why, according to Audit Scotland, it “has not yet set out a detailed strategy for how it will manage the forecast gap between social security funding and spending”; believes that raising taxes in order to remove the limit on the child element of Universal Credit was not the right priority for either the Scottish Government or the UK Government, and calls on the Scottish Government to use the money that it will save, as a result of the UK Government's decision, to lower costs for people across Scotland by instead cutting income tax.