Meeting of the Parliament 19 February 2026 [Draft]
It is interesting that the cabinet secretary admits that the benefits of the Barnett formula give her more money to give teachers high salaries, which the Government then claws back in higher tax. The minister wants to talk about the facts. The simple fact is that those teachers were earning £9,000 below the higher rate threshold in 2018 and now they are £9,000 above it with the Government’s stealth taxes.
Taxpayers in Scotland are now paying an estimated £1.8 billion more than taxpayers elsewhere in the UK. Combined with Labour’s national insurance increases, the SNP and Labour tax rises are set to cost the average full-time Scottish worker nearly £1,800 a year. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that, by 2028-29, someone in Scotland who earns £50,000 will pay £1,500 more than their equivalent in England—that is not a small amount of money—and that, by the end of this decade, one in three Scottish workers will be paying higher rates of tax.
The economic consequences of that are now undeniable, which is why the budget is not only undesirable but unaffordable, as the IFS has repeatedly warned in increasingly alarmist language. Over the past decade, Scotland’s growth has lagged behind that of the rest of the UK by a cumulative £11 billion. The Scottish Fiscal Commission has confirmed that income tax revenues are up to £1 billion lower than they would have been had Scotland matched UK growth rates. CBI Scotland has called the tax divergence between Scotland and the rest of the UK “a handbrake on growth”, while Sir Tom Hunter has said:
“I have never heard so much disquiet among business leaders paying yet more and more tax for poorer and poorer outcomes”.
Why are taxes in Scotland so high? Under the SNP, the state has grown out of control. Civil service numbers have gone up by 74 per cent since 2007. Last June, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government pledged to cut the public sector workforce by 0.5 per cent, but, by September, we discovered that it had grown by 0.4 per cent. The Government has wasted £6.7 billion of taxpayers’ money in this session of Parliament—that is more than £1,200 for every person in Scotland.
That is the cost of the SNP under John Swinney. Social security spending is heading for £10 billion by the end of the decade. Taxes are high because the SNP’s spending is reckless, but the Scottish Conservatives offer a real—and costed—alternative. We would cut income tax to 19 per cent for all taxable income up to the higher rate threshold, which would mean a saving of £444 a year for every taxpayer who earns more than £15,000, and we would uprate the higher rate threshold in line with inflation.