Meeting of the Parliament 20 January 2016
I begin by acknowledging that the Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs was not in his post at the time when much of the arrangements for the reform of the service came into play. It therefore might be helpful for me to share some of my experience of that time.
There is no doubt that the Scottish Government knew from the outset that £10 million was to be paid in VAT. Although, unfortunately, no business plan was provided, ministers gave an assurance that that £10 million would be recovered at some time in the future. However, I think that we knew at that time—and we know it from our experience since then—that that prediction had no basis in fact. Indeed, we are no closer to having the VAT issue resolved today than we were a decade ago, when the whole journey began.
Irrespective of that £10 million, the key issue that we are dealing with today is the pressure on the fire service from an unreasonable target being set for cuts, which ensures that the fire service has to not only pay the £10 million but find a way of replenishing savings from an ever-smaller baseline. As a result, the economies of scale have evaporated and the slimming down of so-called support services has been completed. We now have, as my colleague David Stewart said, 400 fewer full-time firefighters than in 2010 and, within that number, we have 300 fewer firefighters than in 2013.