Hansard

Of course, the response to that is that Scotland spends £117 billion but raises £87 billion in taxes, so there is a £30 billion structural deficit that is paid for by the UK Treasury. We can take that comparison either way.

I suggest to the cabinet secretary that what he has outlined on artificial intelligence, digital improvement and so on should be considered the ordinary course of business. That is how any department should be running; it should be running to maximise its efficiency on any budget. That should not be considered groundbreaking or revolutionary.

I encourage the cabinet secretary to start looking immediately at where we are wasting money, where there is duplication of money and where we are not getting value for money.

I will give three quick examples of that. As referred to by Michael Marra, we have the 132 quangos, which are spending £6 billion. We can talk about the money all day long, but what is interesting is the democratic deficit in how the country is run, with ministers not being able to control spending because it is at arm’s length. To come to Willie Rennie’s point, I saw that at first hand when I was a minister in the Department for Business and Trade and I was given the brief of trying to deal with the compensation for Post Office workers.

What I saw over the past 20 years, when I unravelled it, was a complete disconnect in the lines of authority between ministers and an arm’s-length body that behaved on its own account and did its own thing. The result was that the postmistresses and masters could not get accountability. There was no point in firing the minister, Ed Davey, because he was not in control of it in the first place. Quite apart from the money, can we please bring services back into our control under Ivan McKee, so that he can see the value for money, and so that when he pulls a lever, he can see where the money comes from?

Secondly, we know that energy is reserved to Westminster, so why does the Scottish Government spend £5 billion on net zero? Again, we cannot find that line. We cannot push a button in the public accounts of Scotland and get that number to spit out. We have to do a lot of work and go through many places, but we find that, in the current 2026-27 financial year, the Scottish budget commits more than £5 billion, which is described as record investment, to climate action and net zero measures. In the context of the £72 billion budget, that is approaching 8 per cent. I direct the cabinet secretary to that area as well.

The third area to which I would direct him is welfare. We all in the chamber believe in the welfare state to help people, as a safety net, as they move through life. In particular, we need to do a lot more to help people who have fallen out of the way of work to get back into work. I want to hear a lot more about the effort that we put into helping our colleagues and fellow citizens back into work.

The issue with welfare is that, over the past 10 years, the choices made by the SNP Government—particularly under Nicola Sturgeon, when she created a welfare economy—meant that 15 per cent, which was the biggest spend, was allocated to welfare, versus 3 per cent to education. The welfare budget is out of control. We are heading towards having a million Scots of working age who are not working, which is a national disaster for us all. That is the third area to which I would point Ivan McKee.

At the end of the day, the cabinet secretary has been in business, which is a good thing. We need more people in the chamber who have worked in business. He will know that any business can save 5 per cent of its costs without directly impacting its top line: 5 per cent of £72 billion is £3.5 billion. That would go a long way to fixing his budget, and he would be commended by the Scottish people for that.

I move amendment S7M-00309.4, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:

“believes that public money is limited, whereas demand is infinite; further believes that meaningful reform starts in its chamber by using the time available to reach meaningful and defined decisions; believes that using parliamentary time to debate a motion that lacks any substantive action, and therefore leads to no definitive change, undermines the Parliament’s expressed desire for reform; recognises that emphasis on public service provision should be focused on outcomes and not inputs; believes that the recipients of public services are the most important people in this process and must be the focus of the Parliament’s attention; looks forward to co-operation with staff and legitimate representative groups to raise standards and improve provision, and calls on the Scottish Government to publish a programme of concrete action.”

15:40