The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-12034, in the name of Keith Brown, on protecting public services.
14:26
This debate gives us the opportunity to reflect on the importance of our public services and the vital role that they play through the spectrum of people who teach, treat and serve our communities everywhere in so many different ways. In that context, I mention the continuing progress of Pauline Cafferkey, who I am sure members will be very happy to hear is no longer in a critical condition. She is someone who treats many people here and abroad.
We heard in the chamber last week that, as the economy recovers, growth must be balanced and sustainable. The Scottish Government is clear about its responsibility for setting the vision of a fair, equitable and sustainable Scotland. At the heart of that vision is the importance of high-quality public services and their power to enhance quality of life and improve economic opportunities for all. I believe that the people of Scotland also place a high value on our public services and increasingly recognise that the role that they play is crucial in reducing inequalities, which is a shared value that is essential in ensuring that we have a sustainable economic recovery that all can benefit from.
The United Kingdom Government’s austerity has not just slowed economic recovery; it continues to undermine it. It is an asymmetrical austerity, whereby those who are least able to are those who are shouldering the greatest burden, and with an absence of fairness we cannot have true prosperity.
The five years of austerity that Westminster has already imposed have resulted in real-terms cuts, and there is more—much more—to come. We have challenged that wrong-headed approach on many occasions in the Parliament and beyond, and we will continue to do so, but we face the unwelcome prospect of austerity lasting for a decade or more, regardless of which Westminster party forms a Government in May. Despite Westminster’s cuts, ours is a different approach, and we will continue to invest and to prioritise our work to protect and enhance public services as far as we are able to using the powers that are available to this Parliament.
At this difficult time for people, we are protecting household budgets through the provision of services and policies that make up the social wage, which are sometimes characterised in debate as universal services. We remain committed to freezing the council tax, to continuing the abolition of prescription charges, to maintaining free higher education, free eye examinations and concessionary travel, and to ensuring free personal care for the elderly.
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention on that point?
I will come back to Neil Findlay shortly.
That commitment underpins the Scottish Government’s commitment to fairness, prevention and value for money. I cite the example of the national concessionary travel scheme for older and disabled people, which has important health and social benefits. There is evidence that it promotes socialising and leisure, especially among older people on low incomes. Another measure that is worth noting in that context is the recent announcement to expand the provision of free school meals to every child in primaries 1 to 3, which will save families of every eligible child at least £330 a year.
It would be interesting to know whether Neil Findlay agrees with Jim Murphy that Iain Gray was completely wrong in relation to free school meals or whether he agrees with Jim Murphy’s assertion that Iain Gray was completely right. Perhaps he can elucidate what Jim Murphy believed when he had his meltdown on Sunday. Did he believe in universal services? What is the position of Labour’s cuts commission now?
One of the best ways to keep money in people’s pockets is to keep them in employment. How many jobs have gone in local government under the regime of the cabinet secretary’s party?
Unlike many Labour local authorities, this Government has continued its approach of no compulsory redundancies, which has protected workforces. The crucial point of course is that that provided security for employees—I speak as a former local government employee—and their families during a time of recession because they knew that their jobs would be safe. That is an important point that is part of what we term the social wage for public sector employees.
We have also taken a very distinctive approach to reform. Along with that and guided by the findings of the Christie commission, the Scottish Government is pursuing an ambitious programme of public service reform focused on improving outcomes for people. A clear strategic direction for service transformation is now well established, built around four pillars: working in partnership; engaging and developing the people who deliver our services; continually improving performance; and making a decisive shift to prevention. A wide range of reform is already being delivered nationally and locally, and a shared ambition has been established across the public service landscape to build upon those foundations and increase the pace and scale of positive change.
In terms of preventative spend, what evidence does the cabinet secretary have that the £500 million has had an impact on outcomes?
There is evidence from the change funds that are being established and the benefits in terms of more efficient public services. However, there is also other evidence. For example, if the member cares to look at the user survey on concessionary travel, he will see that it itemises some of the benefits—that is preventative spend.
Gavin Brown rose—
Perhaps the member does not believe that providing free bus travel for our pensioners and disabled people prevents further problems or, indeed, that free prescriptions do so.
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention on that point?
No. I have just answered the point.
I can assure the member that free bus travel and free prescriptions provide long-term benefits in bearing down on public expenditure. Such benefits are also provided by the £500 million that John Swinney has found, and we should not forget that he has done that at a time of huge constraint on public finances. We have taken the tough decision to address reform that was never taken by previous Administrations in this place or in Westminster.
We have invested a great deal of time and effort in a wide-ranging programme of public service reform, from establishing single police and fire services, to college mergers and the establishment of the early years collaborative. The successful transition to single police and fire services is an example of the decisive action being taking in Scotland to protect the resources available to us and ensure continued front-line presence and delivery. Events such as the Clutha bar tragedy and the more recent George Square crash remind us how important front-line services are.
To come back to Gavin Brown’s point, great progress has already been made towards delivering the projected savings by Police Scotland of £1.1 billion by 2026, with approximately £880 million of sustainable and recurring savings secured. We will spend £100 million this year mitigating the coalition’s welfare cuts in Scotland, increase the number of free childcare to 30 hours for all three and four-year-olds by 2020, make real-terms increases in national health service spending in each year of the next session of Parliament and make payment of the living wage a central priority of all Scottish Government contracts.
In education, we have continued to invest in Scotland’s schools for the future, despite the cuts to our capital budget. The total investment for the programme between the Scottish Government and local authorities is £1.8 billion. On 2 January, we announced more than £2 million of funding for an extra 250 places for people to start teacher training next year. We recognise that the future of the profession is important and we are investing in it. In the NHS, only last week the First Minister announced further spending to fund specialist nurses. Those nurses will have a direct impact on people in real need.
Scotland’s public service workers who teach, treat, protect and serve our communities are among the greatest assets that we have. I thank them for their passion, their commitment and their hard work. As was mentioned at topical question time, some of our emergency workers face absolutely horrendous situations on many occasions—indeed, we expect it of them. One recent dramatic situation in my constituency involved the death of a child, and I mentioned earlier the Clutha and George Square tragedies. The emergency workers involved in such situations are also people, and they are affected by some of the work that we ask them to do on our behalf.
That is also one of the reasons why we want to thank them for their passion and their hard work, and why the Scottish Government is committed to a distinctive pay policy that is fair and supports those on the lowest incomes.
Is the cabinet secretary heading in the direction of commending those not employed in the public sector who do valuable work daily in delivering public services? Where is the fair deal for them in terms of jobs and wages?
I am coming on to the point about jobs and wages, but of course we are responsible for not only those whom we directly employ but workers in other public bodies. Duncan McNeil has quite rightly made a point about many of those who are not directly employed, many of whom are volunteers. My colleague Richard Lochhead has been very careful to make sure that we thank them for their efforts—the people working in the seas around Scotland, for example.
We are also clear that we should have fair pay. We should support those on the lowest incomes and protect public sector jobs and services while also delivering value for money for the people of Scotland. We are clear that senior pay packages should be in step with the salaries, terms and conditions that are offered to other staff. We also remain committed to a policy of no compulsory redundancies and have extended that until 2016.
It is also worth while to point out that, in the NHS, we have implemented the agenda for change wage increase for nurses. That has not happened in England and, believe it or not, it has not happened in Wales either. We have stayed with the agenda for change recommendation and, although it is a small increase of 1 per cent, we have paid it where others have not.
We want to support the public sector workforce and we want every individual, no matter what their role or the area that they work in, to feel utterly empowered to formulate the responses that are required to deliver the services that meet the needs and expectations of society.
Will the minister take an intervention?
No. I will make some more progress.
A culture where people feel that they can deliver reform and improvement at the local level is an essential element of Scotland’s approach to service transformation.
The recent announcement by the Conservative Party on limiting public sector strikes is just one example of the different types of relationship with the workforce that ministers north and south of the border are seeking to forge. With that, we have the Tories mimicking the 1970s Labour habit of introducing 40 per cent rules to try to rig ballots. That backfired on the Labour Party when it ushered in 18 years of Tory government. Perhaps that explains why the Tories are so keen on it. However, what cannot be explained is why Labour argued vehemently in the Smith commission to keep trade union law in the hands of the Tories rather than in the hands of the people of Scotland.
Much more is being done, with the programme for government showing our ambition and passion to deliver an alternative plan in a different way. We recognise the full range of strengths, abilities and capacities that are found in all sectors, which is key. Public sector, third sector—to return to Duncan McNeil’s point—and private organisations must work closely in partnership with communities and one another to design and deliver excellent public services that meet the needs of local people. Through community planning partnerships and single outcome agreements, we are seeking to support public and third sector partners to come together and share budgets to achieve outcomes.
If we are to tackle inequalities, power must be balanced—and we have to do that. As well as the idea that five families in the UK have the same combined wealth as the poorest 12 million people, we are now told by Oxfam that three families in Scotland have the same wealth as the poorest 20 per cent of people, and that is in a country that is the 14th richest in the world. Not only is that level of inequality morally wrong; it prevents us from achieving our economic ambitions.
If we are to tackle those inequalities, we need power to be much more balanced between the individual, communities and professionals, and people have to be seen as citizens, neighbours and co-producers of services. The third sector, with its connections, its reach to community networks and organisations and its capacity to mobilise volunteers and external investment, is a critical partner in working directly with individuals, families and communities to co-produce approaches that build on the assets in every community that support resilience and wellbeing.
With that way of working, we can enable greater levels of participation in the democratic process, which also help to unlock the potential that is found in every community. That is the distinctive Scottish approach to public service design and delivery, and it is key to tackling inequalities and delivering the better outcomes that we all seek.
I mentioned asymmetric austerity. If it was the case that everyone faced the cuts that we face equally and shared the pain and the grief together, I am not saying that it would be right—we have a fundamental difference on the approach that is being taken—but it would be easier to accept. However, that is not the case. The need for a strategic approach to service renewal has been internationally recognised, with a Carnegie Trust review of international evidence identifying Scotland as unique in supporting its systemwide rethink of public services with coherent, cross-cutting programmes of improvement.
We are in as good a position as we can be, with the limitations that we have, to get into that service renewal framework, given that we are dealing with policies that are not of our making. As I said, Scotland is the 14th richest country in the world, yet 1 million people in Scotland are in poverty, including 220,000 children, half of whom live in a household where at least one adult works.
Let us be clear that continuing cuts are going to be extremely severe—a figure of £15 billion has been mentioned—so it is more important than ever that we have an alternative approach. There is an “austerity alternative” that would support up to 30,000 jobs. The Scottish Government, for our part, would seek to invest in Scotland’s economy £1.2 billion of additional resources in 2017-18 and £2.4 billion more in additional resources in 2018-19, as outlined in the “Outlook for Scotland’s Public Finances” report.
It would be great to add to that investment the savings that we could make if we were to abolish Trident, which is a policy that Neil Findlay has failed to support in the Parliament on previous occasions. Abolishing Trident would produce in excess of £200 million more every year for the lifetime of the expenditure on those weapons.
The cabinet secretary should draw to a close, please.
The economic impact of that spend would depend on the specific programmes that were allocated to us. It is estimated, based on the input-output tables, that if a £2.4 billion increase in spending was distributed across public services, capital investment and social transfers in proportion to the current share of Scottish public spending in those areas, it could boost the amount of gross value added by approximately £1.5 billion and support up to 30,000 jobs a year.
We have a clear choice: we can stick with the Westminster parties’ consensus on cuts, or we can invest in Scotland’s public services to support economic growth, create jobs and tackle inequality.
I move,
That the Parliament believes that strong public services are the bedrock of a fair and prosperous society; pays tribute to Scotland’s public service workers who teach, treat, protect and serve communities and welcomes continued support for public services in Scotland, including an increase in funding for all NHS boards; expresses concern at the impact that the UK Government’s austerity agenda will have on the delivery of public services; notes that, even excluding cuts planned for welfare across the UK, Scotland faces real-terms cuts to come that are estimated at £15 billion; further notes an assessment by the Office for Budget Responsibility that UK Government cuts will reduce government spending as a proportion of income to its lowest level since the 1930s; recognises that real-terms cuts in spending on services such as police, local government, infrastructure and education will total almost £1,800 per person while, at the same time, the UK Government proposes to spend over £100 billion on new nuclear weapons; further recognises that there is an alternative to the UK Government’s austerity agenda, and calls on all parties to work together to secure economic growth, tackle inequality and protect Scotland’s public services.
We are quite tight for time today. I call Mary Fee, who has up to 10 minutes.
14:40
I am pleased to open on behalf of Scottish Labour this very important debate on public services. Our public services care for, protect and educate us, and the world-class workforce that endures long, tiring hours and environments that, in some circumstances, we cannot begin to imagine deserves our respect and encouragement and our moral and financial support.
The Scottish Government motion once again lays the blame at Westminster’s door without taking any responsibility for its own actions. Although our amendment recognises the difficult financial circumstances, it also acknowledges the pooling and sharing of resources across the UK and highlights the benefit that the Barnett formula brings.
Local government finance is broken; our NHS is at breaking point, with accident and emergency departments in crisis; and our education system, from childcare to college, needs leadership and prioritisation. Meanwhile, the SNP is withholding crucial funds from Scottish councils, the NHS and our children’s future.
Will the member take an intervention?
I will happily take an intervention from Stewart Stevenson if he can explain to me why the Government is sitting with a £440 million underspend when our NHS is in crisis.
Of course, Mary Fee knows perfectly well that we are not doing that. More fundamentally, her party’s amendment deletes from the Government’s motion the reference to expenditure on Trident. Does that mean that she is in favour of investing huge sums of money in Trident instead of investing for the benefit of the people of Scotland and elsewhere in the UK?
As I suspected, I got no answer from Stewart Stevenson. It is disappointing that members on the Government’s benches would rather play political ping-pong than debate this very important issue.
The sum of £440 million is no drop in the ocean for public services—
Will the member take an intervention?
Will the member take an intervention on that point?
No, I am sorry—I need to make some progress.
Will the member give way on that point?
The member is not giving way.
That figure for the budget underspend represents 1.3 per cent of the overall budget and includes £165 million from the schools budget. On top of that, one of Scotland’s main industries is struggling, with jobs at risk, incomes reducing and families worried.
I briefly mentioned schools, hospitals and councils—
Will the member give way?
If Mr Swinney lets me make some progress, I will come back to him.
Those are the issues on which I wish to focus in opening for Scottish Labour.
Teacher numbers are at a 10-year low, and more than 4,000 teachers have been removed from Scottish classrooms at a time when pupil numbers are rising.
Will the member give way?
No, I need to make some progress—I am sorry.
That has led to larger class sizes, and the SNP has failed to keep its promise. Parents and pupils deserve and want better than that, but the Scottish Government responds by holding back money from the education budget.
Will the member give way?
The percentage of pupils in classes of 18 or fewer has fallen from 21.6 per cent in 2010 to just 12.9 per cent last year. That distressing statistic shows that the SNP has no plan to protect public services. Teachers know that the Scottish Government cannot be trusted to assist the education of young children. Children in the most deprived areas are struggling in comparison with those in the most affluent areas, and the attainment gap is substantial, especially for looked-after children.
Scottish Labour supports the role that further education can play in our communities and in growing our economy. It is one of our most precious public services and offers a lifeline to many across Scotland. The opportunity for an education should be available to all, no matter the background of the prospective student. Vocational courses enhance the employability of people in our workforce and those who are unemployed alike and are intrinsic to boosting our economy. Colleges have been under attack by the Government. Student numbers have sharply decreased, learning hours have had a £10 million cut and the further education budget has been squeezed and cut by tens of millions of pounds in real terms.
In its motion, the SNP talks about securing economic growth, but it needs to reassess its stance on college education and reverse its previous cuts. This would be a great opportunity for the new education secretary to re-establish trust in our college system and place faith in the hard-working lecturers who remain in their jobs.
This year’s general election will be unlike any seen on these islands. However, the choice for Scots could not be clearer: do they want a Labour Government that is committed to investing in the NHS, or more of the same attacks on the UK’s most sacred institution? I, for one, look forward to Prime Minister Ed Miliband implementing Labour’s time to care fund, which will see an additional £250 million added to the Scottish budget through the Barnett formula. The mansion tax, the tax on tobacco companies and clamping down on tax avoidance schemes will raise around £2.5 billion. Scottish Labour has rightly pledged to use part of the resulting boost to our budget to fund an additional 1,000 nurses. Again, the choice could not be clearer: a Labour Government that will create resources and use those that are available for the NHS, or the Tories or the SNP.
In the referendum campaign, we constantly heard that the Scottish Government was underfunded and that the NHS would be privatised in the event of a no vote. As we knew at the time and have clarified in the past week, the only crisis in the NHS is one of the Government’s making. Accident and emergency departments are close to breaking point. As Scottish Labour showed at the weekend, since 2012 waiting times have not been met for 12,510 patients. There were 12,510 occasions when patients did not receive their legal right to be treated within 12 weeks. How many of those patients could have received their legal right with additional allocations from the budget underspend? How many nurses, doctors and other crucial hospital staff would the budget underspend have paid for? Those are serious questions, to which patients and their families deserve to know the answers. For the Scottish Government to use the NHS as a primary example of how it protects public services is nothing but a slap in the face for the 12,510 patients denied the legal right that the Government itself brought in. It giveth and it taketh away.
Will the member take an intervention on that point?
No. This is far too important a debate to play political ping-pong—[Interruption.]
Order.
Throughout the debate, my colleagues on the Labour benches will pick up on matters relating to the NHS. Our focus will remain the same: patients deserve better. [Interruption.] It is an example of the Government’s attitude to our public services that it would rather sneer and jeer than listen. [Interruption.]
Order.
An ageing and growing population, increasing operational costs and heavily centralised commitments, such as the underfunded council tax freeze, are placing an unbearable burden on local authorities, which are screaming out for financial assistance.
Will the member take an intervention on that point?
I am not taking any interventions. [Interruption.]
Allow the member to be heard.
The pressure forced on councils is resulting in increasingly difficult decisions that disproportionately impact on the poorest in our society. Under the SNP, local government has taken the largest share of budget cuts. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns us that local government spending is set to fall by 24 per cent in real terms this year.
Every single local authority has faced real-term cuts between 2007 and now. The Scottish Government talks about protecting public services, but that smacks of total desperation and shows how hypocritical the SNP Government is, because those real-term cuts are taking place against a backdrop of increased costs of 10 per cent since 2007, and councils are resorting to increasing the charges for services. The Scottish Government controls 82 per cent of our local authority budgets and it has simply passed the Tory cuts down to our councils.
In her speech to the SNP October conference, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, said that she knew that there were Westminster MPs in all UK parties who were itching to abolish Barnett. However, the only party itching to abolish Barnett is the SNP, and its plan for full fiscal autonomy would devastate our public services.
Could you draw to a close, please?
Last week, Jackie Baillie rightly stated that
“there is no greater danger to our economy just now than the falling price of oil”,
because we rely on the revenues from the oil industry
“to run our public services.”—[Official Report, 8 January 2015; c 56.]
An oil price of $50 a barrel means an 85 per cent cut in revenues compared with what the Scottish Government predicted in its white paper, yet it continues to base its economic estimates on a higher price.
You must draw to a close, please.
Our schools, our NHS, our councils, our justice system and our communities are not safe in the SNP’s hands. Public service workers are the backbone that ensures that we are cared for, educated and kept safe.
I move amendment S4M-12034.2, to leave out from “including an increase” to end and insert:
“; believes that the Scottish Government’s budget underspend of £444 million restricts the potential for Scotland’s public services to invest in hospitals, schools and in local communities; notes that the Barnett formula benefits Scotland’s budget; further believes that redistributive policies such as a mansion tax and a 50p top rate of tax will allow further investment in Scotland’s public services, and calls on all parties to work together to tackle inequality, support economic growth and proudly protect Scotland’s public services.”
14:51
I start by publicly congratulating—because it is the first time that I have had the chance to do so—Keith Brown on his promotion to the Cabinet and Mary Fee on her promotion to Labour’s top team.
The Government motion starts well. A couple of lines in, we were perfectly happy with it. However, very quickly, it turns into a rather predictable, hackneyed complaint, which blames everybody else for issues rather than the Government. It ends with the age-old approach of saying that
“there is an alternative to the ... austerity agenda”.
The Scottish Government claims that there is an alternative, but it will not say what that is. I have lost track of the number of times that we have asked it in the chamber what its alternative is and—more crucially—how that would be funded.
It is all well and good for Keith Brown to stand up and glibly quote from a pre-referendum document on the outlook for Scotland’s public finances that was designed purely to attract votes and say rather nonchalantly, “We could just spend a couple of extra billion pounds in 2015-16, a few billion more in 2016-17 and a few billion more in 2017-18, and everything would be all right.” However, nobody in the Scottish Government has at any point explained where those extra billions would come from.
If it were as easy as putting it in a document to make that spending happen, I suspect that every political party would be saying it and that everybody would want us to do it. However, if a Government is to do that spending, it has to increase borrowing, cut spending somewhere else or increase taxation, and we have a right to know which one of those options would be chosen.
To give just one example—apart from the ones that I mentioned—what about the housing benefit overspend of, I think, £1.4 billion a year, which relates to overpayments and fraud? That amount has grown in recent years. Surely if the member’s Government got a grip of that, we could have more money for public spending in Scotland.
So Keith Brown wants to cut the housing benefit budget in some way to pay for the spending that he describes. I have not seen that on any SNP manifesto.
Every Government—including the Scottish Government, I have to say—does all that it can to cut fraud. I know that John Swinney has put a lot of effort into making sure that that is the case with the land and buildings transaction tax and the landfill tax. Every Government attempts to do that, but I think that most Governments accept that they cannot eliminate fraud entirely.
I did not think that the figures from the document that Keith Brown mentioned were credible when published, and that was at a point in history when oil was trading at $110 a barrel. The figures did not really work then. When the price dropped to $80 a barrel, the figures became even less credible. Then the price dropped from $70 to $60 to $50, and it is now heading towards $45, so the figures are a fantasy.
The outlook for Scotland’s public finances is a historical document. I believed that it was fantasy at the time, and subsequent events have proven that it is genuine fantasy now. The Government can say that there is an alternative but, until it outlines what the alternative is, it completely lacks any credibility.
Will the member give way?
Mr Swinney looked as though he was about to stand up.
No.
In that case, I give way to Mark McDonald.
What is the figure for uncollected revenue through unpaid taxation, which of course would be money available to the Exchequer to spend on essential services?
As the member will know if he has paid attention to the past five budgets and autumn statements, increased resources have been put into Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to cut tax evasion and ensure that we collect the maximum possible amount. The results have been encouraging, as has been said to the Finance Committee in evidence. The UK Government has its critics, but to suggest that it has not been trying to ensure the maximum tax take lacks credibility.
I move on to the point that I made in my intervention on Keith Brown. The Scottish Government needs to start talking about the powers that it has and to take action where it can do so. Three years ago, during the spending review process, everyone in the Parliament agreed that preventative spending is one of the most important things that we can do. At the time, the Scottish Government put £500 million into three change funds over a three-year period to get what it described as a “decisive shift” or “step change” that would improve outcomes and get far better results for people across Scotland.
After three years, how are we doing? Rather helpfully, the Finance Committee yesterday produced its report on the budget, which contains a pretty damaging critique of almost everything that the Government has done on preventative spend in the past three years. We quote Audit Scotland, which said that the approach is
“unlikely to deliver ... radical change in the design and delivery of public services”.
The Local Government and Regeneration Committee’s view is that
“the pace of transformation of service delivery across the public services in Scotland is concerning”.
Will Mr Brown give way?
I am afraid that the member is in his last minute.
The Finance Committee, without any member disagreeing, said:
“there is little evidence of the essential shift in resources taking place to support a preventative approach.”
I am happy to give way if there is time.
No, you are not. You are in your last minute.
My apologies to the cabinet secretary. I was certainly willing to give way.
On the children and young people’s fund, the committee said, without any member from across the parties disagreeing, that it
“remains concerned that despite an investment ... little evidence has been provided of any shift in”
the funding models.
Draw to a close, please.
This is a serious issue. We are talking about £500 million. If the Scottish Government is concerned about public services, it should look at that issue with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that we get it right.
I move amendment S4M-12034.3, to leave out from “and welcomes” to end and insert:
“; believes that a decisive shift toward preventative spending is important to protect public services and to improve outcomes across Scotland; notes the issues raised in the Finance Committee report on the Draft Budget 2015-16 regarding the lack of progress on preventative spending, and calls on the Scottish Government to respond formally in early course to the concerns around preventative spending in that report.”
14:58
Like Gavin Brown, I belatedly congratulate Keith Brown on his promotion. I also welcome the Labour front-bench members to their new positions.
I welcome the opportunity to participate in the debate. I put on record the gratitude and respect of me and the Scottish Liberal Democrats for the vital contribution that is made by all those who work in the public sector in Scotland. I need no persuading that making that contribution has been more difficult in recent times, in the face of the need to bring the country’s finances back under control and tackle the legacy of debt. That has presented enormous challenges and continues to create pressures, not least for those who work to deliver our public services. However, meeting those challenges is made no easier by the SNP Government’s obsession with independence, which leads it to characterise support for Scotland remaining a part of the UK as somehow anti-public service.
We have heard it implied again today that an independent Scotland would—miraculously—be immune from the need to rein in public spending, although the Government’s fiscal commission has advised that matching the UK’s deficit reduction path would be required. World oil prices have fallen to half the level that they were at when the Government’s white paper was published, which leaves an even bigger black hole at the heart of the SNP’s assertions and which would almost inevitably require deeper cuts in public services.
Another tragedy of the SNP’s self-delusion, through which everything that is difficult is always somebody else’s fault, is that it ignores the reality of what is happening now in our public services and removes the responsibility to do anything to improve the situation. What has been happening on the SNP’s watch? The Royal College of Nursing recently reported that staff at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde had expressed concerns that they had too few staff and too little equipment to look after patients properly.
NHS Grampian, too, has been in crisis because of a lack of funding—a situation to which ministers belatedly woke up earlier this week, having taken their eye off the ball for years. The damage caused by that inaction is real. It has affected staff, patients and the wider community in the north-east as well as in the islands that I represent, where my constituents rely heavily on specialist services and treatment that NHS Grampian provides.
Would Mr McArthur care to comment on the Arbuthnott formula, which was in place for many years and led to the underfunding of NHS Grampian? Will he pay tribute to the likes of the late Brian Adam, who had that system abolished—the Labour-Liberal coalition would not abolish it—in favour of the NHS Scotland resource allocation committee? Will Mr McArthur welcome the position that was announced yesterday?
It is funny how there has been a revelation for the SNP with a general election pending. I have been told for years about the underfunding of NHS Grampian and have witnessed the crisis that has unfolded. [Interruption.]
Order.
In our schools, teachers have been put under enormous strain. No one could argue that last year’s roll-out of the new exams under the curriculum for excellence was textbook. The Educational Institute of Scotland repeatedly warned of the effect that the additional workload and the uncertainty were having on teachers as well as pupils and their parents.
Meanwhile, last week we had confirmation that the Government has again failed to honour its commitments on primary school class sizes and teacher numbers. Those failures make life much more difficult for people who work in that key public sector and people who rely on it.
The Scottish Government already has a full range of powers over education and health policy and budgets. SNP ministers cannot duck the consequences of the decisions that they have chosen to make. They might wish to say that a big boy did it and ran away, but blaming Mr Salmond does not absolve them of the responsibility to face up to the choices that any and every Government has to make.
For example, it is perfectly legitimate for ministers to boast about the continued freeze on council tax, but only if, at the same time, they accept the effect that it has on councils’ ability to meet the demands that are made of them for a wide range of services and if ministers acknowledge that the freeze, which everybody knows benefits most the people who live in the largest houses—it is an asymmetric benefit, if you will—means that less money is available for other priorities, including measures that are targeted at the people who are most in need.
The other nonsense that the SNP trots out is that it has no truck with the private sector helping to deliver public services. For sound, pragmatic reasons, that has never been the case, despite protestations over the past eight years. In that time, ministers have been so happy for Kilmarnock prison to be run by a private operator that they have subsequently offered the same private operator—Serco—a contract to run lifeline ferry services to Orkney and Shetland.
Our health services have long involved private operators as partners that carry out specific operations and treatments, as well as helping to achieve Government targets on, for example, dental provision. The truth is that the SNP has presided over annual increases in the amount of public money that is spent on private providers in the health service—that is now to the tune of more than £400 million.
For all the talk today and in the motion about the UK Government’s austerity agenda, the fact remains that Barnett consequentials from protected health and education spending have allowed the Scottish Government to plough spending increases into key public services if it wishes. A further £238 million will come to Scotland courtesy of the autumn statement. If we add to that the significant underspend that Mr Swinney has admitted to running up, the assertions from the SNP are even more nonsensical.
Moreover, the economic course that the coalition Government has taken has put the UK’s finances back on track. Liberal Democrats have anchored the economic policy in the centre ground. From that security for the future, we can build quality public services that are affordable and sustainable into the long term. We should contrast that with the prospectus that is offered by the nationalists, who still appear intent on pursuing independence by the back door.
The SNP took its eye off the ball in the pursuit of independence—an obsession that remains for many of its members—so we will not take lectures from it on public services. The Liberal Democrats have helped to protect those services in Scotland by balancing spending and borrowing to allow continued movement from economic rescue to recovery. That is the best and most robust foundation on which to build a strong economy and a fairer society that can deliver high-quality public services and opportunity for all.
I move amendment S4M-12034.1, to leave out from “including an increase” to end and insert:
“; notes the recent concern expressed by health professionals regarding pressure on the NHS, particularly accident and emergency services and the lack of sufficient resources to ensure parity between the treatment of physical and mental ill-health; further notes that some NHS boards have still to reach parity through the NHS Scotland Resource Allocation Committee formula and that Aberdeen and Edinburgh City councils are still receiving under the 85% floor for revenue allocations; understands that the Scottish Government will benefit from additional funding of £238 million through to 2015-16 as a result of spending decisions taken by the UK Government in the Autumn Statement 2014; notes that the Scottish Government’s Fiscal Commission Working Group advised it to match the trajectory of UK deficit reduction even beyond the 2015 general election; further notes the Scottish Government’s continuing underspend on day-to-day services, and believes that the best platform to achieve a strong economy and a fair society best able to deliver high quality public services and opportunity for everyone is from an economy anchored in the centre ground, with spending and borrowing balanced to allow continued movement from economic rescue to recovery.”
15:04
We should take a step back and look at the reality of what is going on at this moment in time. Let us quote some of the bodies that the Tory-Liberal coalition often speak about in this chamber. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has described the planned cuts as
“Spending cuts on a colossal scale … taking total government spending to its lowest level as a proportion of national income since before the last war.”
The Office for Budget Responsibility notes that, under the coalition Government’s plans, total public spending would fall to 35.2 per cent of GDP by 2019-20, and would
“probably be the lowest in around 80 years.”
Basically, it is back to the 1930s, folks.
Further, economist James Meadway says:
“On the fundamental issue of austerity, there is remarkably little to choose between Conservative and Labour.”
Those are the realities, and it is likely that, today, Labour will enter the lobbies with the Tories at Westminster to support £30 billion-worth of austerity cuts. That might be the Westminster way, but it is not the way that I want to go and I do not think that is the way that the people of Scotland want to go.
At the same time as we are seeing cuts to public services that amount to about £1,800 per head of the population, we see this continued nonsense of talking about replacing the current weapons of mass destruction system with another one. One of the things that amazes me about that situation is that, again, there is little between Tory, Labour and Liberal on that front. They all seem happy to throw tens of billions of pounds at such abhorrent weapons, which, hopefully, will never be used, and seem perfectly at ease with the idea that the cuts that are required to pay for these weapons of mass destruction will fall on the poorest members of society.
When he was shadow defence secretary, the current Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy, told BBC Radio Scotland’s “Good Morning Scotland”:
“We’re in favour of the UK retaining a nuclear capability”.
He also said that Labour’s anti-nuclear stance in the 1980s
“was a flirtation with surrealism”.
I will tell you what I think is a flirtation with surrealism: spending money on weapons of mass destruction at the same time as Westminster is cutting public services in a way that is having a major effect on the poorest in our society. That is a flirtation with surrealism as far as I am concerned, and it is something that I want to see changed dramatically.
We have heard a lot of nonsense about what this SNP Government is doing. Of course, this SNP Government has to cut its cloth according to the money that it gets. That money comes from the Treasury, and has undergone cut after cut after cut. At the same time as that has happened, we have seen on the part of the SNP Government clever ways of dealing with the situation, ensuring that public services are protected to the utmost, and I believe that the people of Scotland recognise that the protection of services such as the National Health Service is something that the SNP Government has done particularly well.
In his speech, Mr—gosh, I have forgotten his name. The representative from Orkney—Mr McArthur.
I even let him intervene!
The speech was easily forgotten, because it was the usual nonsense.
Mr McArthur failed to take account of the years in which his party was in power in this place. At that time, they had a dud formula—the Arbuthnott formula—that dealt with NHS spending. My colleague Brian Adam campaigned long and hard against that, and it was this SNP Government that eventually got rid of Arbuthnott and replaced it with a fairer formula, in the form of NRAC, largely due to lobbying from the likes of Brian Adam and other colleagues. Beyond that, we have seen from this Government a move to create parity more quickly.
Will the member give way?
I am in my last minute.
The member is in his last minute.
I thank the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Sport for the announcement that she made yesterday, which will see £15.2 million extra coming to NHS Grampian—an uplift to NHS Grampian’s £49.1 million budget for next year. The share of the NHS budget to Grampian has risen from 9.1 per cent when this Government came to power to 9.7 per cent today. Staffing levels have increased by 4.4 per cent and there are 29.6 per cent more medical consultants in NHS Grampian now than there were when this Government took power. That is good news as far as I am concerned.
I will continue to lobby for the north-east, as ministers well know, but we have to look at what this Government has achieved despite Westminster cuts.
15:10
In debating the protection of public services we always inevitably end up confronting the question of what is most important to us. For the Labour Party, Nye Bevan’s dictum that
“the language of priorities is the religion of socialism”
is never far from our minds, nor indeed is the Labour Party’s proudest achievement—the creation of the NHS, which is the legacy of that same Nye Bevan’s politics and priorities. Colleagues will have plenty to say about the NHS.
However, we are Scottish, too, and are thus mindful of what is perhaps Scotland as a nation’s greatest public sector legacy—our education system. Our oldest university recently celebrated its 600th anniversary. Next year, it will be 400 years since the school establishment act, which was the foundation of the system of a school in every parish—the idea of universal education, which underpins our education system to this day.
The Government motion calls public services
“the bedrock of a fair and prosperous society.”
That is true of no service more than education. In the aftermath of what happened in France and the current debate around liberty, rights and how they play against security, it is worth remembering that Lincoln’s colleague Edward Everett said:
“Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”
So, it is a idea worth protecting and it is up there with the health service as a public sector priority. The Government motion is explicit in identifying education as one of the key services that we must protect, but it also portrays the Scottish Government as a protector of public services. Indeed, the Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Cities waxed lyrical in such self-praise in his opening remarks.
We are entitled to ask what priority the Government has given to education and to what extent it has met the standards that it set for itself.
On the subject of priorities, this afternoon the Labour Party will march through the lobby with the Tories not just to back the Tory budget but to lock the UK into austerity for many years to come. What does that say about Labour’s priority for public spending and what does it say to the people of Scotland about the message that the Labour Party is sending to them?
Our priorities are to protect the public services, have stable finances and allocate them in the place that is most important to our political priorities. That is the point that Nye Bevan was making back in the 1950s and it is the point that all serious politicians have to make today.
That requires a degree of honesty and we can ask ourselves whether that degree of honesty has been forthcoming from the Scottish Government. This is the Scottish Government that promised Scottish parents that it would maintain teacher numbers at the levels that it inherited in 2007 so that class sizes would decline. In 2011, it promised to continue with reductions in class sizes and to improve pupil teacher ratios. The truth is that there are now more than 4,000 fewer teachers in our schools than there were in 2007 and pupil teacher ratios are higher than they were eight years ago—and they are rising. Classroom assistant numbers have been cut; additional support provision has been cut; and preschool teacher numbers have been cut. Numeracy levels are falling and the attainment gap between children from poorer families and the better-off remains persistent and significant.
I have listened to what Iain Gray has said. Will he explain, given what he has said, why when the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities gave evidence to the Education and Culture Committee on next year’s budget it said that the budget looked okay and it did not look for any more money? I understand that COSLA is dominated by Labour councils. Will he also comment on the fact that only two councils actually gave evidence—
Right, that is long enough.
I do not mind taking an intervention, but that was a speech—and people complain when we do not take interventions.
Whatever COSLA might have said, I can tell Joan McAlpine what the EIS said. The EIS is in absolutely no doubt that when the Deputy First Minister presented the budget just before Christmas, he abandoned his commitments on teacher numbers and class sizes when he replaced them with broader educational outcomes.
There may be nothing wrong with the idea of broader educational outcomes, agreed with teachers and parents—that is what Mr Swinney said that he was going to pursue. However, my question is this: after eight years, three education secretaries and two First Ministers, does he not think that someone should have got round to working out what our educational outcomes for schools are before now?
We want our schools to be the best in the world and we want to see the attainment gap, which leaves too many pupils behind, addressed at last. That will not happen until our schools are given real, not just rhetorical, protection. The truth is that schools have probably suffered less than colleges. Further education budgets were slashed in 2012-13, this year’s budget maintains the financial squeeze, 1,500 posts have gone from our colleges and 140,000 fewer students are able to study in them.
It is hard to see where the protection of schools and colleges has been and harder still when we find out in the latest outturn figures that there has been a £165 million underspend in the education budget. Yes, we need to protect public services such as education from Tory plans, but we also need to protect them from this Scottish Government, with its false promises, wrong priorities and empty rhetoric.
15:17
I am delighted to speak in this debate for a number of reasons, not least because it illustrates that we have a tale of two Governments.
We see the Government in London slash and burn public services. It wishes to conquer and destroy the welfare state, the NHS and the entire commitment to collective good that we have all grown up with. Like its mentor Margaret Thatcher, it is ideologically opposed to the principle of public service. Its recent proposal to remove the right to strike from public service workers demonstrates that contempt for all kinds of collective action—although if it gets its way there will be no public sector workers left at all.
As has been mentioned, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which the coalition Government itself set up, predicts that total public spending will fall to 35.2 per cent of gross domestic product by 2019-20, which will
“probably be the lowest in around 80 years”,
according to the OBR.
The UK Government pursues its social vandalism, known as austerity, even though all the facts show that it has failed. By the end of 2015, the UK economy is forecast to be almost 4 per cent smaller than was predicted in 2010, when the Chancellor first entered office. By contrast, the Government in Scotland has maintained superior public services in the most difficult of circumstances. Between 2010-11 and 2015-16 the Scottish Government’s discretionary budget has been cut in real terms by around 10 per cent and independent analysis suggests that that could reach almost 20 per cent by 2018-19.
Of course, cuts to UK spending have a further knock-on effect on Scotland’s devolved budget if we try to mitigate the effects of policies such as welfare cuts.
If the Scottish Government has protected public services to a greater degree than the UK Government has done in the rest of the UK, can Joan McAlpine explain why Scotland is investing almost half as much in science education in schools as the rest of the UK is?
The record of Scotland’s schools speaks for itself. The fact that we have delivered free education while students in England and Wales have to pay £9,000 a year in tuition fees and that younger students are being deprived of the education maintenance allowance shows how far ahead we are in terms of provision of and commitment to public services.
I was talking about the further knock-on effects on Scotland’s devolved budget if we try to mitigate policies such as welfare cuts, as we must do for decency’s sake. Offsetting the bedroom tax, establishing a Scottish welfare fund and topping up council tax benefits are all essential and they all take money out of public service budgets. Westminster’s mess must be cleared up, but there is a cost, and this year that cost is £104 million.
There is worse to come. The OBR has forecast that 60 per cent of the UK Government’s cuts have still to take effect. Given that background, it is nothing short of a miracle that Scotland’s public services still perform well. The health resource budget, for example, has grown by 4.6 per cent in real terms despite the overall 10 per cent cut in Scotland’s resource budget.
I have already mentioned free tuition.
Has the health budget grown by more in England or in Scotland?
Scotland’s spending per head on health is far greater than that in England, as Gavin Brown well knows.
As I was saying, the health resource budget in Scotland has grown by 4.6 per cent in real terms despite the overall 10 per cent cut in Scotland’s resource budget that has been inflicted by Gavin Brown’s Government colleagues in London.
In criminal justice, we have delivered 1,000 extra officers while the number of officers in England and Wales will drop by more than 15,000.
In the coming year, we will support the provision of 600 hours of childcare to more than 120,000 three and four-year-olds and eligible two-year-olds. The roll-out of free school meals, of course, shows that the commitment to universalism and the social wage remains despite the mounting pressures that are being placed on us.
What is perhaps most remarkable about this tale of two Governments is that, despite all those pressures, the Scottish Government continues to look ahead and to develop and enhance public services that are fit for the 21st century, even if the UK wants to roll them back to the first half of the 20th century.
In health, for example, we should all welcome the commitment to the 2020 vision for health and social care, which enshrines the prevention agenda that was set out by the Christie commission. Under the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014, which comes into force in April this year, new partnerships between the NHS and local authorities will have the responsibility for planning and delivering health and social care services in their areas. That will meet the needs of vulnerable people in their communities and take pressure off our NHS. I welcome the additional £100 million that has been allocated to aid integration in 2015-16.
Also in health, further important preventative work is being funded and taken forward in the detect cancer early programme, for example. I was very pleased to see that the draft budget proposes that that line should increase in cash terms from £8.5 million in 2014-15 to £9.3 million in 2015-16.
You should draw to a close, please.
I started by talking about a tale of two Governments, but perhaps I should have talked about a tale of two Parliaments, because it appears that, whichever unionist party holds power on the banks of the Thames, the outcomes will be equally dismal. In December, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband both promised to meet the Tory cuts; in fact, last week it seemed that they were vying with the Tories to show that they would be tougher on public services.
You must close, please.
All the while, they have promised to equal Tory spending and renew Trident at a cost of £100 billion, which will, of course, detract from huge swathes of public services in the UK.
That is excellent. Many thanks.
15:23
The UK coalition Government is involved in an ideologically driven attack on the very services that civilise our society. Those services mean that, irrespective of our wealth, we all get our bins emptied, our children receive an education and our elderly are looked after. We access a whole host of other services.
We see Cameron, Clegg and Osborne driving further privatisation and closing libraries, youth services and sports and leisure facilities. Housing budgets are being slashed and social care is in crisis. Those are services that Cameron, Clegg and Osborne do not want and can flog off to their City friends, or which they do not use so, to them, there is no value in them. They must be surplus to requirements. That is the attitude of the coalition. For the sake of people who rely on those services, let us hope that the coalition is booted out of government in May and replaced by a Labour Government.
Does Neil Findlay agree that the privatisation of those public services is a bad thing, as he has just said, or does he agree with the right-hand man of the Labour leader in Scotland, John McTernan, who said:
“Privatisation is good for the NHS”?
I will listen to the Labour leader in Scotland, thanks very much.
It is not just in England that we see cuts to services—far from it. I often wonder what planet SNP back benchers live on. Here in Scotland, local government is at breaking point and the NHS is under strain like never before in its history. Council services are no longer being cut—some services are disappearing altogether. However, today, the cabinet secretary has come to the chamber with all the gall and brass neck that we associate with this Government to move a motion paying tribute to those
“who teach, treat, protect and serve”
our communities. There is no recognition, self-awareness or even a mention that any of the policies that are being pursued by this Scottish Government are impacting badly on our people and our communities.
Who exactly is the cabinet secretary paying tribute to in his motion? Is he paying tribute to the classroom assistants who I worked beside in his constituency, some of whom were like mothers to the vulnerable children in my classes but who have lost their jobs? Is he paying tribute to the community wardens who keep our streets clean and safe but who have been paid off? Is he paying tribute to the social care staff who work for private contractors demanding 15-minute care visits, some of whom work for as little as £5.13 an hour on a zero-hours contract?
Is the cabinet secretary paying tribute to the police support staff, thousands of whom his Government has got rid of? Is he paying tribute to the ambulance staff who still cannot get proper breaks or the fire control room staff whose jobs have been centralised and cut, or the thousands of college lecturers and support staff who have gone following Mike Russell’s disastrous spell in charge of our colleges? Perhaps he is paying tribute to the 40,000 council staff who have lost their jobs across a range of sectors; perhaps he is paying tribute to the public sector workers who he says that he is protecting so well, but who will be on strike in this very building next Thursday because of John Swinney’s pay policy.
Will the member give way?
No thanks.
I am sick to the back teeth of this Government’s hypocrisy and of hearing it at times of bad weather or following an emergency or an accident praise public sector workers for their effort and commitment in one breath and then, in the next, pass budgets that mean that more of those very same workers will lose their jobs or have their pay reduced or frozen, or that our services are cut.
Will the member give way?
No thanks.
The Government claims that the council tax freeze has been fully funded in each year of its term in office. That is an out and out lie. Look at the West Lothian Council from 2003 to 2011. I was a proud council member at that time. In 2006, we won UK council of the year because we were a well-run and efficient council providing good-quality, valued public services. It is still is a well-run council.
Despite Government claims to have fully funded the council tax freeze, West Lothian Council has been forced since 2007 to cut its budget by £58 million and it will need to cut its budget by another £30 million over the next three years. Those eye-watering cuts are even greater than those that were passed on by Osborne and Eric Pickles to local government in England.
As John Stevenson of Unison put it a few days ago:
“40,000 jobs have been lost across Scottish councils. If that had been any other employer, politicians would have been queuing up to demand action and a rescue plan.”
He is absolutely right. Rather than engage in such rank hypocrisy, the cabinet secretary should be apologising for his Government’s actions in slashing our services while sitting on a £444 million underspend. What hypocrisy.
Will the member give way?
No thanks.
We cannot go on like this. What the Government is telling public sector workers is immoral. We need to fund our services. We need a mansion tax, a bankers’ bonus tax and a 50p tax rate; we need our local government services to be fully funded. We need a Labour Government.
15:28
Neil Findlay has just lectured us on hypocrisy. Like Alice in Wonderland, I try to believe six impossible things before breakfast. One of those impossible things was not that Neil Findlay would be capable of making such a speech on the very day that his party will march through the lobby with the Tories at Westminster and condemn the UK to further austerity, whatever colour of Tory Government is elected in May. It is crucial, were there to be a Labour Government, that it is not a majority Government but one with an SNP conscience attached to it, to ensure that the public sector and the services of Scotland are protected.
Indeed, today we see the real progressives in the Westminster Parliament—the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens—opposing the Tories, while the Labour Party backs up the Tories. We will take no lectures on hypocrisy from Labour, which talks left in the Scottish Parliament but votes right at Westminster.
Will Mark McDonald give way?
I may give way to Mr Macintosh a little later.
There is an opportunity for us to consider how we protect public services, but it is galling to hear Labour Party members throw around comments about an underspend that they know full well is allocated against financial transactions and managed expenditure and therefore cannot be used in the ways that they suggest it can be used, with the exception of the £145 million that Mr Swinney announced in Parliament in June that he would carry forward and use in the financial year to fund welfare mitigation measures and economic support, for example. We have seen Mr Swinney take action on the underspend that he is able to carry forward and utilise.
It is equally galling to be lectured about hypocrisy by Labour members, given that when the SNP inherited office in 2007 we had to negotiate furiously with the Treasury to secure the £1 billion for Scottish expenditure that the previous Labour-Lib Dem Executive had left in a Treasury bank account, and which could have been lost to Scotland’s public services because of the then Executive’s inability to manage its budgets appropriately. We will take no lectures—
Will Mark McDonald give way?
We will certainly take no lectures from Jackie Baillie on these issues.
Will the member give way—
No. As I said, I will give way to Mr Macintosh if he wants to come in later. I will use the rest of my time to talk about other issues.
The Labour Party lectures us on teacher numbers, too; Labour says that we are reneging on our commitment on teacher numbers. We have said repeatedly in the Scottish Parliament that we want to ensure that the teacher to pupil ratio is maintained.
It is interesting to note that the calls on teacher numbers are coming from Labour councils and the Labour leader of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. I was on the Local Government and Regeneration Committee when the Labour leader of COSLA told the committee that he wants councils to be given greater flexibility on teacher numbers. Labour-led local authorities said that, too. Before Labour members come to Parliament and start lecturing the Scottish Government on teacher numbers, they might want to get their little provincial houses in order in the councils that they run; they might want to tell their councillors that they are the ones who need to get their acts together when it comes to teacher numbers.
Will Mr McDonald, instead of quoting other people, remind members what the SNP promised on teacher numbers at the last election?
As Mr Macintosh well knows, the SNP inherited office in 2007 and Labour wrecked the economy in 2008, forcing us into a situation in which we had to manage our budgets in the face of austerity, which began under Alistair Darling and has been continued by George Osborne. He should check the record on that before coming to the chamber and pretending that the world was not changed as a result of Labour’s economic mismanagement.
During Gavin Brown’s speech I asked him what progress had been made on collection of unpaid taxes. His response was evasive. That is because the figure has remained stubbornly at around £30 billion and has not shifted dramatically in any way, shape or form. The UK Government is not pursuing corporations that are not paying their fair share of tax with the zeal with which it pursues people who are at the margins of society—vulnerable citizens and voiceless individuals, who are unable to lobby and put forward their arguments in the way that people from the wealthiest strata of society can do when they meet members of the UK Cabinet in certain gentlemen’s clubs. If those voiceless individuals had the same networks and opportunities, they might get the feather duster treatment that the wealthiest people in society appear to be getting. So much for those with the broadest shoulders bearing the burden. It tends to be the weakest in society—those who are less able to put their case or to stand up to the UK Government’s relentless assault on their incomes—who bear the brunt. That is a disgrace.
We know that that is what we get from the Tories—we do not need to be lectured on that, because we know that that is what happens when the Tories are in government—but the biggest regret that people will have is that, up here in Scotland, we are being sold the message that the Labour Party is somehow an alternative to that. It is not; it is simply a repainting of the same tired old approach. That is all that is being offered by the Labour Party in Scotland, so it should just be honest about it.
15:35
It should come as no great surprise that David Cameron’s coalition Government policy is austerity for all, but especially for women. It is certainly no surprise that Labour supports that policy, even in the corridors of power at Westminster today. The public schoolboy network that spawns Tory MPs like a mother frog blessing her tadpoles with some automatic right to power does not really get women. However, I remind the Prime Minister and his acolytes that women make up a little more than half of the voting public, even in wealthy Tory seats in the home counties. I am not naive; I do not think for a moment that my drawing attention to that obvious reality will make the slightest difference to the policies of the current Westminster Government. That is why we need more SNP MPs to shift the balance. Nevertheless, it is worth looking a bit more closely at just how misogynistic the actions are.
The “family-oriented” Westminster Government is taking at least £360 a year off new mothers in real terms through the combination of a freeze in statutory maternity pay and the removal of the health-in-pregnancy grant.
Let us move along the age range a wee bit. Westminster’s welfare cuts threaten to put another 10,000 of Scotland’s children into poverty—100,000 across the UK—and the reductions in benefits will take away over £6 billion from Scottish households. If that figure is hard to grasp, let me mention that £6 billion would fund the NHS for the whole of Scotland for a full six months.
Mr Findlay would not answer the cabinet secretary’s question on Mr McTernan’s views on the health service, but maybe the Labour Party will answer this. On 1 August 2014, in an article in The Times, Mr McTernan said:
“Privatisation: what is it good for? Everything. That’s what I feel like shouting at the TV and radio when I hear Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, pontificating about the supposedly dire effects of competition in the NHS.”
That is how the Labour Party in Scotland views the NHS—as an opportunity to make money.
Maybe we women need to go back to our caves and stop challenging the menfolk when they go out to slaughter the bison. I do not think so, although it sometimes feels as though that is what Westminster would like us to do. The bedroom tax, the disability living allowance, the introduction of universal benefits and the personal independence payment—those policies are not only fundamentally wrong but discriminate specifically against women. Why? It is because it is mostly women who manage the care of disabled children or parents and who are the food bank users—whose number has increased 400 per cent—who have to somehow keep the household ticking over and put food on the table.
Women in Scotland are still, on average, paid less than men for the same jobs, and the benefit cap that was introduced by Mr Cameron and supported by Labour MPs is a clear attack on single women with children, as such households make up 60 per cent of those who are affected.
There has also been a reduction in child benefit, which is another attack on women. It was the one benefit that they could bank themselves, but it has gone. The proportion of childcare costs that is covered by working tax credits has been reduced, there has been an increase in the taper rate for tax credits, and the baby element of the child tax credits has been removed. In addition, there is a requirement for lone parents on income support with a youngest child aged five or six to move to jobseekers allowance. Finally, under the new universal credit system, a single monthly payment will be made to one person in a couple household, with a single earnings disregard that may weaken the incentive for the second earner—the woman, in the main—to work. Again, that removes women from the direct-payment package. The First Minister has made it clear many times that Westminster’s benefit reform programme impacts unfairly on some of the most vulnerable members of our society—in particular women, mothers and their children.
Speaking of this Government’s agenda for change, there is another elephant in the room, which we have heard much about today: Trident. Westminster has given us the news—which is backed by Labour at Westminster and obviously by Labour here, too, as Labour members would not answer the question that was put to them earlier—that it intends to spend about £100 billion on replacing the existing Trident system. How is that for prioritisation? I say that it should be bairns, not bombs.
Of course, Labour’s record on prioritising is doubtful anyway. In Scotland, it was Labour that enthusiastically rolled out the private finance initiative, which means that we are now tied into private sector deals that strip about £2.4 billion out of our budget every year. The Scottish Government does what it can to mitigate the effects, but until we have full fiscal control of welfare, we will continue to be limited in how much we can deliver.
Members have already heard some of the figures that show that commitment. I would like to go back in history a wee bit. Remember Paul Sinclair? I am sure that some Labour members do. A number of years ago, he wrote an article in the Daily Record when the then finance minister Angus MacKay was justifying the fact that the Scottish Executive
“couldn't cope with the amount of extra cash”.
As a result, £718 million was sent back to the Treasury by the last Labour Government in Scotland, so let us have no talk of underspends, because that is an embarrassing fact.
I am not the first to say that Scottish politics will never be the same again following the referendum, but I reiterate it. We will indeed hold feet to the fire when it comes to securing our legitimate right to control our own budgetary policies. We will need to move on from a Dickensian view of the role of women. Protecting our public services is the way to do that.
15:41
Many of us will be pleased that the Scottish Government is holding a debate on protecting public services, because teachers, hospital staff and public servants across Scotland are struggling with the impact of budgetary and political decisions that have already been taken, and the forthcoming general election throws into stark relief the very future of the public services that we expect and rely on.
Tory plans to reduce public spending to levels that have not been seen since the 1930s finally give the game away about the whole austerity agenda. An economic crisis that was created by private spending and borrowing has been successfully used as cover for an attack on public spending and borrowing. Welfare—the largest part of which goes to pensioners—is portrayed as being wasted on work-shy benefits scroungers, and new laws are being mooted to prevent public sector workers from even withdrawing their labour. The Tories hide behind the argument of balancing the books, but their agenda goes way beyond that. Those of us who believe in the value of good shared common services—those of us who believe that they provide the backbone of a good society and the
“bedrock of a fair and prosperous society”,
as the motion puts it—have a battle on our hands at the next election. It is one that we have to win.
Even beyond the political threat that is posed by the Tories, there are growing pressures on our public services that we also have to deal with; I refer to new demands such as the demographic changes in our society. Healthier lives and medical advances, for example, mean that ever more of us are living with dementia or cancer, so we must respond to that demand. I do not underestimate the difficulty of getting that right. Just this week, the limitations of the approach of the well-intentioned English cancer drugs fund was revealed. It has an overspend that means that availability of cancer drugs will be cut back.
As well as growing demands, we have higher expectations. An example of that is the expectations that people have with regard to single-patient wards. The Scottish Government might try to adjust the targets, but as it has discovered, if more and more people are waiting for longer than four hours in accident and emergency, it is not good enough to say that the situation is better than it was 15 years ago.
It is good that we are holding the debate and it is good that we are resisting the Tory approach, but that should not blind us to the challenges that we face. We should not pretend that the Tory assault on the public sector allows us to evade or escape from our own responsibilities. The Government in Edinburgh has already taken a series of decisions. Choices are being made, and it is not enough simply to bemoan how difficult those choices may be. Joan McAlpine mentioned that universities have been offered some protection, but that is because colleges have been abandoned and 140,000 Scots have been denied a learning opportunity because of that decision.
Just this weekend, we heard from the health secretary that revenue has been protected for some but not all health boards, and that capital spending has been cut. I believe that that is confirmation that the Scottish Government is cutting NHS spending in Scotland in real terms.
No—that is not correct. Real-terms spending on the NHS has gone up by 4.6 per cent since 2010. All boards will get an uplift through the NHS Scotland resource allocation committee; £380 million is being provided in 2015-16. All boards are getting more money. A record £12 billion is being provided, which is £3 billion more than Mr Macintosh’s party spent on the NHS when it was in government.
The minister again refers to revenue. I point members to the Auditor General for Scotland’s report, in which she reveals real NHS spending.
We also know that the Scottish Government has asked our councils to bear the brunt of the cuts, so we have more than 4,000 fewer teachers. I noted that Neil Findlay was uncharacteristically generous to the Scottish Government earlier when he said that there have been 40,000 public sector job losses in local government, although the Scottish Government’s own statistics reveal that there have been 70,000 job losses over the past eight years.
Care visits are restricted to 15 minutes from carers who earn barely the minimum wage, let alone the living wage, public sector wages have been frozen and pensions have been restricted. Those are all decisions that have been taken here in Edinburgh by the Scottish Government—not by the Tories.
SNP back benchers and ministers will protest that they have no choice and that they operate within a fixed budget, but of course that is not exactly true. We know that they have a choice because, for example, after much pressure from Scottish Labour, SNP ministers finally used their powers to mitigate the bedroom tax. In fact, Scottish ministers are the first to point out that funding decisions that have been taken by the UK Government do not apply here and do not have to be repeated here.
It is also not strictly the case that we have a fixed budget. We have tax-raising powers in the Scottish Parliament and always have had since our inception in 1999. That is where we get to the real difference between Scottish Labour and the SNP, because Labour would keep the public finances under control but would find the additional money that is needed to fund public services by restoring the top rate of income tax to 50p for people who earn more than £150,000 a year.
Ken Macintosh appears to be suggesting that more money should be spent in every portfolio. Can he advise whether he envisages the rate of taxation that he would levy being sufficient to fund the increases that he is calling for? Does he not accept that when we have a fixed budget that is being reduced, we must ensure that we manage finances across all portfolios appropriately?
Mr Macintosh, you must begin to conclude, please.
I am just in the middle of outlining exactly where we would raise our money: by restoring the top rate of taxation and introducing a mansion tax that would fund 1,000 extra nurses. Those are choices that the Scottish Labour Party is willing to state publicly, but despite repeated offers to them, we cannot get one SNP member or minister to state that they would do likewise. They are not prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
I am afraid you need to close, please.
They are not prepared to fund the choices that we wish to see. If the Scottish Government continues to be unwilling to talk about tax rises or where it will find the money, and continues to say that we should swap the pooling and sharing of resources for our oil revenues, I do not believe that it will get the confidence of the Scottish people.
I must indicate to members that interventions have to be taken from their speech time, which is six minutes.
15:47
The theme of the debate is protecting public services. A key aspect of any debate on protecting public services is first to identify what valued public services we wish to see protected and flourish. On the SNP benches—
I am sorry, Mr Doris. Can you move your microphone up slightly?
Absolutely.
The Scottish Government has a clear vision for protecting our public services, whether it is the restoration of free university education, which was rejected by the Labour Party; universal free school meals, on which the Labour Party seems not to have a position or seems to change it from day to day; the abolition of prescription charges, which the Labour Party fought tooth and nail to oppose; expanding the concessionary travel scheme, which the Labour Party sought to reduce significantly; providing more money for free personal care; an additional 1,000 police officers on the beat; or whether—we should listen to this one carefully, but Jim Murphy especially should listen—it is 1,700 more nurses in the NHS under this SNP Government than under the last Labour Scottish Executive.
The SNP and the Scottish Government have laid out clearly our vision for what protecting public services actually means in practice.
Will Bob Doris take an intervention?
Perhaps I will, if there is time later.
However, what we do not know, of course, is where Labour’s cuts commission is these days. If members remember, it said that everything was on the table and nothing was off it. However, Labour has been silent on the commission. Perhaps if Mr Murphy ever finds himself in this place—I hope, of course, that he would never be in a position of power here—he could give us some more information on the commission.
Of course, any public service has to be paid for—something that will become increasingly difficult as the UK continues to accelerate its programme of savage austerity. I note that it has been said today that Ed Miliband will support the UK Government’s so-called charter for budget responsibility, which would sign Labour up to matching Tory budget cuts to Scotland pound for pound, and millions of pounds for millions of pounds.
That is part of the process that will take £6 billion out of the welfare system in Scotland by 2016. Those cuts are aimed at attacking the most vulnerable people in our society, and the Labour Party is wedded to them. For example, Labour’s Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson, Rachel Reeves MP, said that Labour would be tougher than the Conservatives on benefits. Let us not forget that.
Where does it leave the Scottish Government when we see 100,000 disabled people in the firing line with further cuts to disability benefits, a further 100,000 children being pushed into poverty because of UK benefits changes, and thousands of families being worse off because of the tax credit changes? Christina McKelvie gave a very good exposition of why those savage cuts target women and children in particular.
The Scottish Government has pursued a policy of mitigation where it can, with £35 million for discretionary housing payments to end the bedroom tax—where we can—being made available in Scotland so that no one loses out; £38 million for the Scottish welfare fund in the face of UK cuts; funding of council tax benefit, which the UK Government has also cut; and the reopening of the independent living fund in Scotland, with more than £100 million each and every year for mitigation. The Scottish Government is not just protecting public services, but is protecting the public, where we can.
Much has been made of the Scottish Government’s so-called underspend. I understand that the figure is £145 million. The Scottish Government has already said for a significant time that the money will be spent in the financial year 2015-16. However, we have had retrospective funding bids for how the Labour Party would have wanted that money to be spent. “Let’s just give it to councils.” “Let’s give more to the NHS.” Let’s give it to colleges.“ ”Let’s give it to schools.“ ”Let’s give it to care workers.“ ”Let’s give it to fire staff.“ The total could be an eye-watering figure; indeed, Mr Findlay said that West Lothian Council alone should have had £88 million from that £145 million spent on it.
Will Bob Doris take an intervention?
Labour has no credibility at all. Let me—
Will the member take an intervention?
Mr Findlay, the member does not seem to be taking your intervention.
No, thank you.
Let me tell members what the Scottish Government has said it will spend that £145 million on. We should remember that the Labour Party has spent it five, six or 10 times over. I am looking forward to adding up the bill that the Labour Party has accumulated today. The Scottish Government will spend the money on economic support in these difficult and straitened economic times. We will spend it to further mitigate the worst aspects of UK welfare reform.
When the Scottish Government makes those financial commitments, no one on the Labour benches should welcome them. They should actually criticise them, because they would have spent the money already; the money would be gone and the bank would be empty, with no more money to spend on protecting our economy and none left to protect the most vulnerable people from welfare reform. The cupboard would be bare.
There is absolute hypocrisy from the Labour Party. I look forward to there being no exercise in arch deceit when it gives its opinion when we spend that £145 million, as we will, on protecting the Scottish economy where we can, and on protecting our most vulnerable people, where we can.
I trust the SNP and this Government, in the face of savage UK Tory cuts, or red Tory Labour cuts after the next UK election, to defend our public services.
You must close, please.
Gee whiz! I hope that the SNP is in a position to hold the balance of power at UK level so that we can protect the people of Scotland.
15:53
Let me start on a consensual note and congratulate the Labour Party on the third part of its amendment, which
“calls on all parties to work together to tackle inequality, support economic growth and proudly protect Scotland’s public services.”
That is pretty hard to disagree with. Essentially, of course, it just replaces the last part of the Government’s motion, which it deletes, with a slightly different formulation. More significant is what the Labour Party’s amendment takes out of the Government’s motion, which is most of it.
First, we might look at the deletion of the reference to and criticism of
“the impact that the UK Government’s austerity agenda will have on the delivery of public services”.
Labour obviously disagrees with that criticism, as it deletes it from the Government’s motion.
Secondly, Labour’s amendment seeks to delete from the Government’s motion the reference to welfare cuts of £15 billion, so clearly the party agrees with those cuts.
Ken Macintosh rightly referred to the fact that Government spending at UK level currently makes up the smallest proportion of national income since the 1930s, but at 5 o’clock he will, if he so chooses, vote for a Labour amendment that seeks to delete the reference to that fact from the Government’s motion.
The reality is that Labour’s biggest and most important proposed deletion from the Government’s motion relates to spending money on weapons of mass destruction rather than on other things. The motion is drawn quite widely and covers all levels of government. I will spend a bit of my time highlighting the need for proper defence for Scotland and our interests, which is an issue that also touches on the UK’s wider interests.
Scotland contributes disproportionately more soldiers than does elsewhere in the UK. When our soldiers were peacekeeping in Kosovo, they had to use their personal mobile phones for communication because the Army’s mark IV radios were so poor that they did not work properly in the mountainous terrain. That is because money was not spent on developing communications systems that were fit for purpose.
When our soldiers were in Iraq, they were ordering boots by email from suppliers in the UK because the rubber soles on the boots that the Army had provided were melting in the desert sands. The equipment was not fit for purpose.
More fundamentally, in Afghanistan, the UK has so few helicopters that only 5 per cent of soldiers have gone to points of application by helicopter, in comparison with 95 per cent of US soldiers. The most dangerous part of deployment is when soldiers travel from their barracks to the point of application. As a result, the casualty rate among UK military personnel has been 50 per cent higher than the rate for the US military, because we are not investing money in the right equipment for our troops. That diminishes their effectiveness and leaves Scotland and the UK vulnerable.
In the past week, we have seen further evidence of underinvestment. As a result of money being diverted to weapons of mass destruction that will never be used in our maritime interests, we have had to scrounge support from other countries when there appeared to be threats off our shores.
Scotland has the longest coastline in Europe—in fact, our coastline is half the length of that of China, which is one of the biggest countries in the world after Russia. Every single country around us has a proper defence system. The Irish have maritime surveillance aircraft, as do the Icelanders and the Norwegians, but the UK has none. The Irish have eight vessels posted around their coasts to provide coastal defence, and the Icelanders also have vessels, but there is not a single vessel based in Scotland for the purposes of coastal defence or support.
Spending our money on weapons of mass destruction not only deprives our public services and public servants of proper funding; it does not even serve the purposes of defence by any reasonable measure that one might apply.
We need to get the basics right rather than spend money on weapons of mass destruction. I seek to make not a moral case against such weapons, as easy as that would be, but a simple pragmatic case that highlights the current priorities that the Labour Party, in common with other parties, seeks to delete from the motion. I assume that Mr Findlay and all his Labour colleagues will, at 5 o’clock, vote to spend £100 billion on new nuclear weapons.
There are only two of us in the chamber who were born—I think—before the creation of the national health service; I will not name the other member. I was fortunate—as others have been fortunate since the health service was founded—because my parents were able to afford the cost of approximately £50 for an operation for my mother so that she could conceive me and give birth. There may be members in the chamber who regret that, but the kind of benefit that I got from my family is now, through the health service, extended to all our population.
I congratulate the Labour Party on having created the health service back then; would that the party once again adhered to the principles that carried the health service into being and resiled from the cuts agenda to which it is now irrevocably wedded.
16:00
I was enjoying that until that wee chat at the end.
Stewart Stevenson said that there is not a lot that we would disagree with in the motion. Few of us would disagree that
“strong public services are the bedrock of a fair and prosperous society”
or would not pay
“tribute to Scotland’s public service workers.”
In fact, there is an outstanding level of agreement about how we, collectively, would provide public services and how we would like them procured and so on. Why, then, have we spent the past couple of hours trading figures, finance and numbers, and talking about who did what and who cares more? None of us has a monopoly on care or on respect for the public sector and its workers.
I genuinely agree with Duncan McNeil that there are people in good heart, and they are not all on the Government benches. I just want the member to step up to the plate in what he actually does.
I was not addressing my comment to Stewart Stevenson personally; I was referring to his speech. It was not meant as a personal attack on the member. It is a criticism of us all that, when there is such agreement about what we should be doing, we seek excuses for not doing it. That is the point that I will try to make.
The emphasis is on the austerity resulting from the financial crisis, and on various policies being pursued by a Government and a party that I have never supported. Many years ago, the effect that those policies had on my community, my neighbours and my friends drew me into politics.
We were discussing these issues 10 years ago. A decade ago, we had the Kerr review of the health service, which acknowledged that there were serious issues that we needed to address in health and that the demographic challenge would put an impossible strain on health services as they existed—and as they still exist. As winter crisis follows winter crisis, the health service is dealing with increased numbers through the door.
We have been slow to see that as a priority. We ditched it many years ago. It is no surprise that, a decade on, we hear the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing calling for a review of the Kerr review.
I very much welcome the tone of Duncan McNeil’s contribution. However, does he think that one of the biggest public sector reforms that we have seen in a decade is the integration of health and social care, which takes place from April? Surely it is important that we all make that work.
I agree with the cabinet secretary that we should make that work, but the fact that we had to introduce legislation to make it work gives us an idea of the scale of the challenge and the problem, a decade on, in integrating health and social care. Maybe if we stopped fighting about numbers and about who does what and where the Tories are, we would be addressing some of these issues.
Five years ago, Crawford Beveridge told us that we faced the worst financial crisis since the war. He was asked by the current Government to carry out an independent budget review. The purpose of the review was to present an informed and dispassionate account of the scale of the expenditure challenge that Scotland faces over the coming years and to look at the option of discounting the way in which we currently spend public money. That was the challenge five years ago. One of Beveridge’s recommendations was to discontinue the council tax freeze; another was to impose a two-year wage freeze on council employees. It is strange that we can claim to have chosen to continue the council tax freeze but to impose a wage freeze on some of the lowest-paid workers in Scotland, without any doubt.
If Beveridge provided the economic imperative for politicians in Scotland—in this Parliament—who have responsibility for addressing all these issues, Campbell Christie outlined the moral imperative for us to act. Times of limited resources are when the politicians are tested. It is all right when we have money in surplus—now and in the past, the decisions are much easier—but when there is a decline in the budget, the decisions are much more difficult. That is when priorities must be put in place. Remember that Christie said:
“Alongside a decade of growth in public spending, inequalities have grown too”,
so the money that is spent is not necessarily the issue. I think that I would agree. When we had money, we did not deal with the inequalities and it is all the more difficult now.
You must conclude, please.
I will finish at that point and leave members with that challenge. Let us have a constructive debate; let us accept our responsibility; and let us use the money that we have wisely to fulfil our commitment to reduce inequalities in Scotland.
16:06
I am pleased to follow the thoughtful and constructive speech that we have just heard from Duncan McNeil. I congratulate Keith Brown on his appointment as cabinet secretary and welcome Mary Fee to her front-bench position.
We have heard from speakers this afternoon that the UK Government’s austerity agenda has failed. I certainly agree with that and I think that it is a view that is borne out by a range of evidence from a variety of reputable sources. The agenda has failed because it has impeded recovery and economic growth; it has failed because public spending, as we have heard, is at its lowest level in modern times; and it has failed on its own terms because borrowing is now higher than when the coalition Government came to power in 2010.
Austerity has failed because it has hampered economic growth. The UK economy is now forecast to be almost 4 per cent smaller than was predicted in 2010, when the chancellor first entered office. The fact is that austerity is harming the economy; it is putting pressure on household and family budgets and it is putting pressure on public services.
Austerity has failed because public spending is at its lowest level in modern times—a point that was made by Kevin Stewart and Ken Macintosh. As we heard, public spending will fall to 35.2 per cent of GDP by 2019-20 and will
“probably be the lowest in around 80 years”,
according to the OBR. Therefore the reality of the UK Government’s austerity agenda is that total Government spending will be reduced to its lowest level since the 1930s, yet we know that the bulk of the cuts are still to come.
The chancellor has confirmed cuts of £25 billion—much of it from the welfare budget—beyond 2015. Analysis shows that 60 per cent of the revenue cuts to the Scottish budget are still to come. The Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of the chancellor’s autumn statement states:
“the overwhelming fact about the public finance plans remains that spending in ‘unprotected’ departments is set to have fallen by more than a third by 2018-19, with most of those cuts still to come.”
The IFS goes on to state:
“A worsening of long run public finances gives the Treasury extra money to spend now. That is not a sensible way to think about fiscal policy.”
Finally, austerity has failed on its own terms because borrowing this year will be £108 billion—£50 billion higher than the chancellor predicted in 2010—which means that the total borrowing under this UK Government will be in the region of £430 billion.
If we agree that austerity has failed, what is the alternative? The Scottish Government has led the way in promoting an investment-led recovery by accelerating capital spending on vital infrastructure projects. It has protected the front-line public services—in particular the revenue budget of the NHS—and it has mitigated the impact of the UK Government’s welfare reforms on the most needy and vulnerable people in our society.
On capital spending, the Scottish Government has accelerated spending on infrastructure projects to secure economic growth and create jobs. Just two examples of that are the investment in the Forth replacement crossing, which is supporting 1,200 jobs, and the Scotland’s schools for the future building programme, which is worth £1.8 billion. That will deliver 91 new schools by March 2018, including the new Boroughmuir high school at Fountainbridge in my constituency and the new James Gillespie’s high school, which is also in my constituency.
As the cabinet secretary reminded us, despite the cuts to the Scottish departmental expenditure limit budget, the Scottish Government is committed to increasing the NHS revenue budget in real terms for the remainder of this session of Parliament and for each and every year of the next session of Parliament. Although the Scottish fiscal resource budget is being slashed by 10 per cent in real terms over this session of Parliament, the health resource budget will increase by 4.6 per cent.
One of the biggest scandals in the NHS and our public finances is the private finance initiative. As I have said before in the chamber, the PFI contract for the Edinburgh royal infirmary is one of the worst examples of an NHS contract anywhere in the UK. Over the lifetime of the contract, the taxpayer will have paid out £1.44 billion in service charges. In the current financial year, it will cost the NHS £47 million. That contract is robbing the NHS today—and will continue to do so well into the future—of valuable resources that should be used to safeguard front-line NHS services, recruit and retain hard-working healthcare professionals and provide the high-quality, patient-centred healthcare to the people of Edinburgh and the Lothians that we all want. That is why I renew my call, with the support of Unison and the British Medical Association, for a full-scale parliamentary debate on the operation of the contract.
Christina McKelvie was right to remind us that welfare reform impacts disproportionately on women, as carers and single parents.
On PFI, does the member accept that the Government’s non-profit distributing project is just PFI by another name and that therefore, if we are going to look at one, we must also look at the other?
I am happy to have a debate on NPD and PFI, but it is time for Labour members to come off the fence and to decide whether they wish to back my motion and have that debate. The point about NPD is that we need to factor in the investment that we are not able to make through the public loan route, which I and the Government would prefer, because of the financial and borrowing constraints within which we currently operate.
I am afraid that you must come to a close, please.
Let us have the debate about PFI and NPD. I look forward to it.
I will end with a quote from Unison Scotland’s convener, Lilian Macer, who has said:
“Public services are used by everyone at each stage of life. We want to see money spent on them not as a cost, but as an investment.”
Surely we can all agree with that.
16:12
The cabinet secretary said in his opening speech that we need public services that are sustainable and fair. I agree that, if we are to continue to provide public services, they need to be sustainable and fair. I agree with Duncan McNeil that we should look at ways in which we can move forward and protect our public services at the point of delivery.
No one in the Parliament disagrees that there has been austerity or that there are greater austerity cuts to come, although we perhaps disagree about the impact of those austerity cuts on services and about the Scottish Government’s priority of mitigating some of the cuts that have come to Scotland. There has been mitigation of welfare reform, which has impacted on the most vulnerable in our society. Duncan McNeil talked about tackling inequalities, and I agree that we need to tackle such issues.
I believe that some of the programmes that the Government has taken forward are right. The cabinet secretary mentioned concessionary travel, which is not just about getting a free ride on a bus; it enables people to get out of their homes.
Given that the member represents an area with a large rural population, does he agree that people who live in a rural area where there is no bus do not get out of the house?
Perhaps Mr Findlay is not aware of the support that the local authority and Stagecoach provide in my rural constituency, so perhaps there are buses so that people can get out of their homes.
Free concessionary travel is related to health and wellbeing. It gives people the opportunity to take advantage of a service that they would otherwise have to pay for and, with limited budgets, would probably not be able to afford.
We should be able to agree about other services, such as free personal care for the elderly, and I think that we do.
Last week, I was at the North East College in Aberdeen. It is a wonderful new college that sees the way forward and is working closely with the University of Aberdeen and Robert Gordon University. It is considering what is needed to sustain the economy of the north-east, and it is providing the necessary skills and training in the college sector. The college commended the Government for the work that it did to bring the colleges together in the north-east, which was the right thing to do.
There are issues in the health service—no one can say otherwise—but the Scottish Government has realised that and has taken appropriate action. NHS Grampian has rightly been criticised recently. There is no doubt about that. There was mismanagement in the board and by management. No one shies away from that. However, NHS Grampian has a world-class service and a world-class new A and E department; it was just mismanaged. The Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Sport and the previous Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing have visited NHS Grampian. Malcolm Wright, who is there at the moment, is taking cognisance of all the factors and putting things on the right path.
Yesterday, the cabinet secretary announced additional funding for NHS Grampian, bringing it to parity with the other NHS boards in Scotland. The Scottish Government has been working towards that ever since it came to power in 2007.
We need to applaud many aspects of the services that the Scottish Government has been moving forward, such as the protection of rural schools. Rural schools take more out of the public purse—of course they do—but they support local communities and ensure that they survive.
I commend free eye tests to the members of the coalition Government parties and Labour because they are viewing the austerity programme through tunnel vision.
We turn to closing speeches. I call Liam McArthur, who has six minutes.
16:18
Thank you, Presiding Officer—and thank you for remembering my name.
I reiterate my support and that of my party for the work that is carried out by all the people who work in our public services. I am under no illusions about how difficult it has been for them over recent years or about the challenges that are set to continue. However, those challenges can be overcome, as has already been demonstrated by considerable innovation and creativity throughout the public sector. In difficult times, that gives cause for some optimism.
Public sector workers deserve our full-throated support across the chamber. However, that is not the same as giving false promises or setting out easy options that have more to do with short-term electoral calculations than a long-term commitment to the public sector. Unfortunately, there has been too much of that in a number of speeches, although there were honourable exceptions, including the speeches from Duncan McNeil and Stewart Stevenson.
To echo the touching expression of mutual admiration that Mr McNeil and Mr Stevenson were involved in, I have generally found Mr Brown to be a reasonable minister to deal with. We have had our disagreements—some of them fairly vigorous—but he has always been approachable and willing to listen, even if he has not always been willing to act in the way that I would have wished.
Therefore, I would normally be prepared to take on board and take seriously Mr Brown’s call for all parties to work together to secure economic growth, tackle inequality and protect Scotland’s public services. Unfortunately, the premise on which his call is based rather undermines its sincerity. For one thing, it presupposes that nothing is happening already, but that is simply not the case.
Having denied that the coalition’s strategy for dealing with the debt and growing the economy would ever work, the SNP now blusters that it is the wrong sort of economic growth and that we should be racking up more debt. In fact, it is growth and a debt-reduction approach that give the best prospect of protecting public services in the future. It is no wonder, then, that the SNP’s own fiscal commission emphasised the need to match the UK’s debt-reduction path for the foreseeable future.
Action to tackle inequality is also taking place in trying circumstances. That is what lies behind the delivery of the pupil premium, free early learning and childcare for 40 per cent of two-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and free school meals for all pupils in primary 1 to primary 3. In each of those areas, the UK coalition Government has led. In response, the Scottish Government has followed, followed partially or flatly refused to follow at all.
Is there more that could be done to grow the economy, tackle inequality and protect public services? Absolutely. Does that mean that the SNP is not taking steps in all those areas? Absolutely not. However—as Iain Gray rightly suggested in his speech—we require more honesty from the SNP Government about where we are now and what the implications are of the choices that it has made, and we need a willingness to focus on using the powers that we have and are set to take on to deliver those critical objectives.
Unsurprisingly, today’s speeches focused on three areas. In health, there is no getting away from the crisis that we are seeing in a number of areas, notably Grampian. Mr Stewart—who, clearly, was put off by my pre-Christmas haircut—was keen to focus on the Arbuthnott formula. The review of the Arbuthnott formula began in 2005 and concluded in 2007, and the agreement from the Government to take forward the reforms came in 2008. Therefore, I do not think that it is unreasonable of us to question why it has taken seven years to address the problems of underfunding in that regard.
Will the member give way?
I took an intervention from the member the first time I spoke.
I promise to remember his name this time.
Not even on that basis.
With regard to NHS Orkney, where underfunding has again been an issue, the increase that we have seen will simply go towards paying off the borrowing that has been required to make good that underfunding.
On education, we have heard from a number of colleagues about pressures in our primary sector, in our secondary schools and in the college sector, which is coping with significant cuts, and we have heard about local authorities that have been put in a straitjacket by a council tax freeze that removes local accountability and the flexibility to respond to local needs. In Edinburgh, Aberdeen and, indeed, Orkney, we are seeing relative underfunding.
In health and education, the Scottish Government has full policy and budget responsibility. As Ken Macintosh said—and as, by implication, Mark McDonald accepted—government is about choices, whatever powers we have. I think that Duncan McNeil was right to point out that those choices become more difficult in straitened times. Nevertheless, such choices are the stuff of government. Claiming credit for all the popular stuff—such as the things that Bob Doris was keen to rattle off—is credible only if the Government is going to take responsibility for not doing what the popular stuff prevents it from doing.
Independence offers no panacea—quite the reverse. A number of members referred to what has happened to the oil price over the past six months. The independence white paper said:
“With independence we can ensure that taxation revenues from oil and gas support Scottish public services”.
Today, we have heard an alternative prospectus that is based on tackling fraud in housing benefit and tackling tax evasion, which are both priorities for the UK Government—they are a priority for any Government—but they are not the basis on which to found an alternative economic vision.
We need to continue to anchor the economy in the centre ground and to continue to move from economic rescue to recovery. That is the best platform for a fairer society with high-quality and sustainable public services, which—as Stewart Stevenson acknowledged—we all want to see.
Before we move on, I remind members not to respond to interventions that they do not officially allow, because that makes it difficult for our recording of proceedings.
I also remind members that all members who have participated in the debate are supposed to be in the chamber for closing speeches. In that regard, I regret to note that Iain Gray is not in the chamber.
16:24
I also welcome Keith Brown to his new role.
I welcome the debate—hostile though it has been—if only as an opportunity to dispel some of the myths and scaremongering contained in the Government’s motion, which Gavin Brown dealt with in his opening speech. Given that health is my particular interest, that is what I will focus on.
Personally, I have always felt that politics is demeaned when point scoring is used with regard to the NHS. Having begun my association with the NHS as a medical student 56 years ago, and having spent my entire working life in the health service and most of my time in Parliament dealing with health issues, I am all too aware of the constraints and pressures that are put on our front-line services. However, to keep resorting to slogans such as “the UK Government’s austerity agenda” when there is a real need to rein in public spending merely reinforces the narrow-minded approach taken by the SNP Government and its tendency to blame Westminster for all Scotland’s ills.
Let us look at some facts with regard to the rest of the Government’s motion. It looks pretty feeble to hark back to the 1930s, which was long before even I was born or the NHS was dreamed of—and, yes, I am the other older member referred to but not named by Stewart Stevenson.
There have been peaks and troughs over the years in the share of GDP that goes into public services, but it was 36 per cent in the late 1990s and it is predicted to fall to 35.2 per cent in 2019-20—a fall, but hardly the dramatic fall of SNP rhetoric.
What I do agree with in the motion is the need to pay tribute to Scotland’s public service workers in all our public services. Given my experience, I particularly pay tribute to all those who staff our NHS—every one of them, from porters to cleaners, cooks, secretaries, associated health professionals and medical staff in primary, secondary and tertiary care. Those are the people on the front line of NHS care. They are the people on whom patients depend and they, with the patients whom they serve, are the people who want to hear proactive thinking and co-operation from politicians, not the point scoring that we are increasingly hearing as election time approaches yet again.
The NHS has faced many crisis times throughout its existence, but there has never been a greater need for a united approach to dealing with the enormous pressures that currently face the service, as highlighted by Duncan McNeil, nor has there been a greater need for co-operation between the authorities that provide care for our increasingly elderly population. Only through the real integration of health and social care services, with a focus on people’s actual needs, can we expect to achieve our desired goal of people living at home or in a homely setting in the community for as long as possible, thus relieving some of the existing serious pressures on our overworked NHS staff.
The Liberal Democrat amendment, which has some merit, actually points to chronic underfunding of the NHS over many years, particularly in some health board areas, which is only now being addressed. Yesterday’s announcement in Aberdeen of £15.2 million, while very welcome, has come only in the wake of the recent crisis in NHS Grampian. A and E problems are, in significant measure, due to the impaired flow of patients through the system, which leads to bed blocking because care provision in the community is not adequate. Aberdeen City Council has the lowest level of funding of all local authorities, as well as having to deal with competition from the oil and gas industry, which makes it difficult to recruit and retain carers in the city.
Does the member acknowledge that Aberdeen City Council told me yesterday that it has an underspend in its social care budget because of the difficulty of recruiting and retaining staff? Does she therefore welcome the work that is going on to try to develop the key worker affordable housing option for all public sector workers in the area?
That is part of a range of measures that need to be taken, but there is still a very acute shortage of carers in the city.
Gavin Brown’s amendment rightly turns our attention to preventative spending—an area that the Government appears reluctant to even consider as an alternative option to overbloated public spending. We have today heard its usual arguments around that.
The NHS budget has been fully protected by the current Westminster Government, leading to Barnett consequentials of around £1.3 billion since 2011. It is, of course, for the Scottish Government to determine how that money is spent. We do not always agree with its choices, but that is politics.
There are undoubted pressures on the NHS, given the demography of an ageing population in Scotland and a lack of qualified specialists in A and E and in the field of cancer care, for example. There is also a need to address waiting time delays, which have led to increased reliance on the use of the private sector—something that is denied by the SNP but which has been accepted by health boards such as NHS Grampian as they strive to provide care within the time limits set by the Government. Members on the Conservative benches fully support the principle of an NHS that is free at the point of delivery and need and which is funded from the public purse, but let us have a real debate about how care is to be delivered in the future.
The Government must address two areas of particular relevance: the care for older people change fund and the integrated care fund. It is quite clear that the Government seems to be ignoring its commitment to a
“decisive shift to preventative spending.”—[Official Report, 22 September 2011; c 2162.]
When she sums up the debate, I therefore ask the health secretary to give an undertaking that the pledge of £500 million made by John Swinney in the 2011 spending review will actually be honoured and to acknowledge Audit Scotland’s grave concerns that there has been little progress on
“radical change in the design and delivery of public services”.
My colleague Jackson Carlaw and I are committed to the health service in Scotland and are happy to work with other political parties in the interests of delivering good patient care, but let us stop the blame game and stop living in the past, and instead focus on where we go from now on. We need to think beyond this year’s Westminster election and next year’s Scottish Parliament election and get down to the very difficult but essential task of some long-term thinking and a coherent strategy for the future.
I support the amendment in Gavin Brown’s name.
16:30
So there we have it—the general election starting gun has certainly been fired in the chamber today. The debate crystallises the choice that people face in the general election in May. If people inhabit the world of the SNP Government, everything is the UK coalition’s fault. I reject absolutely the Conservative-Lib Dem austerity plan, because it falls on the shoulders of the most disadvantaged and those least able to cope—[Interruption.]
Order, please.
However, I find it frankly extraordinary, but not surprising, that the SNP denies any responsibility. It must share part of the blame.
Before I turn to the SNP’s record, I will spend a little time on its offer going into the general election. On 8 January, Alex Salmond said that the election is about full fiscal autonomy: the ability to raise and spend all Scotland’s taxes in Scotland. I hear no disagreement about that from SNP members, which is really interesting, because that is a flirtation with reality. He is saying that he will plunge Scotland into deficit—
Oh!
Well, they sigh, but let us think this through. The oil price has declined rapidly. It was estimated at $113 a barrel in the SNP’s independence white paper, but it is down at $48 a barrel today. Under independence, the revenues due to Scotland would be slashed. Oil is not some optional extra that is quite nice to have; it is central to our public services—it makes up 20 per cent of our tax base and the reality is that its price has fallen off a cliff.
A price of $50 a barrel would mean an 85 per cent decline in revenues. That would mean almost £6 billion less to spend on public services annually, which blows out of the water the SNP’s position on cuts. Frankly, the hypocrisy is breathtaking, because the SNP’s cuts would be deeper and faster than even those of the UK coalition.
Let us spell out what that would mean. It would mean cuts. It would wipe out the schools budget in Scotland. It would wipe out the budget for all the nurses and doctors in our hospitals and our community health settings. It would wipe out the entire infrastructure programme for next year. [Interruption.]
Order, please.
Under the SNP’s plan for full fiscal autonomy, the Barnett formula would no longer exist. We would face £6 billion in cuts immediately. How many schools and hospitals would that close? How many teachers and nurses would we have to make redundant? Instead, we have the security of the Barnett formula, which has been guaranteed—in the vow and the Smith agreement—to continue.
Will the member give way?
I ask Mark McDonald who warned how much Scotland would lose if Barnett was scrapped.
Allow me to pose a question to Jackie Baillie. The new Scottish Labour chief of staff said that Labour is committed to £20 billion of cuts if elected. What would the impact of that be on Scottish public services?
I asked Mark McDonald a question; he failed to answer it. [Interruption.]
Order, please.
Let me tell Mark McDonald, if members want to listen, that it was Nicola Sturgeon who warned how much Scotland would lose if Barnett was scrapped. In October 2014, she spoke about
“£4 billion of cuts for Scotland that would result if the Barnett Formula is scrapped as so many Westminster politicians want.”
She said that in January, March and June last year, but scrapping Barnett is exactly what her former boss wants to do.
Will the member give way?
No—we have heard enough from Mr Stewart.
Is it, as Alex Salmond says, full fiscal autonomy with billions of pounds of cuts that are deeper and faster than even those of the UK Government that will protect public spending in Scotland, or is it the Barnett formula? Is Nicola Sturgeon in charge or is Alex Salmond continuing as a back-seat driver?
Let us deal with the underspend of £444 million. That money was not spent in a time of growing austerity, when the cost-of-living crisis has had a huge effect on families across Scotland. That underspend occurred in a time when the SNP Government was cutting budgets. Just think what public services could have done with that £444 million.
Let me remind the SNP of the words of John Swinney. He said:
“Long gone are the days when hundreds of millions of pounds of government money would be underspent each year, doing nothing to help communities around the country.”
That was in June 2009. Really—I kid you not. That was when he claimed an underspend of around £30 million. Now the figure is 15 times that amount, at £440 million.
Shona Robison rose—
Teacher numbers are down, college places and bursaries have been cut, and there is an underspend of £160 million in education. I will take an intervention from Shona Robison on why her Government is failing the people of Scotland.
I wonder whether Jackie Baillie can address two points. First, the £145 million of that money that can be put into public services has been put into them by John Swinney. The rest of the money involves financial transactions and annually managed expenditure, such as student loans. As her party’s finance spokesperson, Jackie Baillie must know that that cannot be redirected into public services. Can she say why, when she was a minister, she did not spend £718 million? [Interruption.]
Order.
Let me remind Shona Robison of the words of John Swinney. He said:
“Long gone are the days when hundreds of millions of pounds of government money would be underspent”.
We have heard enough from the SNP.
Let us look at the SNP’s record extremely quickly. In education, teacher numbers are down by 4,000 to a 10-year low. The promise of smaller class sizes has been broken, 140,000 college places have been slashed and 10 million hours have been cut from learning. Schools are starved of resources.
In health, accident and emergency services are struggling, despite the best efforts of staff. Some hospitals have closed to new admissions and people have been on trolleys for 14 and 17 hours; in one case, a person was on a trolley for 20 hours. That is ridiculous. Bed numbers have been slashed, there is pressure on social care and we have seen a spike in delayed discharges. Some £65 million of Barnett consequentials is welcome, but that does not begin to address the problem. Some 12,000 patients have not had their 12-week waiting time target met. That is 12,000 patients who have been denied their legal right by the same Government that legislated for it.
Let me compare health spending in England and Scotland.
Will the member give way?
The member is in her final minute.
I have an interesting table that shows that health spending in England has gone up by 4.4 per cent, whereas health spending overall in Scotland has dropped by 1.2 per cent. That came from the Scottish Parliament information centre. I would prefer to believe it than the SNP.
Neil Findlay was right to ask you about the loss of public sector jobs, of course. There are more than 40,000 fewer public sector jobs across Scotland. I say to Christina McKelvie that women had the majority of those jobs.
Let me finish with a word on which party is actually progressive. Labour will have a top rate of income tax of 50p in the pound so that those with the broadest shoulders will pay more. Labour will introduce a mansion tax that will fund our pledge of 1,000 more nurses and more, and Labour will tax bankers’ bonuses. The SNP simply wants to cut corporation tax even more than George Osborne does. It wants full fiscal autonomy.
You must close, please.
That would mean £6 billion of cuts in public services.
That is the choice: fiscal autonomy with huge cuts with the SNP, or the security of the Barnett formula.
I am afraid that you must close.
The SNP has been rumbled. It is prepared to sacrifice public services and not to reduce inequalities in Scotland.
I remind members to address their remarks through the chair, please.
16:39
Am I the only member who remembers Jim Murphy’s comment that we would see a change of tone under his leadership—that the Labour Party would cease to be the anti-SNP party? There is not much sign of that today from Labour.
The debate has given us an opportunity to reflect on the importance of our public services and the vital role that is played by the spectrum of people who teach, treat and serve our communities everywhere and in so many ways. All of us respect and value the people who work in our public services. Duncan McNeil was right on that point. It is not just members in one part of the chamber who care, but members in all parts of the chamber. However, we have different policy priorities for how public services should be delivered. I will say more about that in a minute.
As the Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Cities said in his opening remarks, the five years of austerity imposed by Westminster have resulted in real-terms cuts. We have challenged that wrong-headed approach on many occasions in this chamber and beyond and will carry on doing so.
Despite the cuts, we have a different approach in Scotland, and we will continue to invest in and prioritise our work to protect and enhance public services as far as we can with the powers that are available to the Parliament.
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
In a minute. It should be noted that, while we have been having this debate, the Tory MP David Mowat has been on his feet in the Commons making the case for a Tory-Labour coalition after the election, based on the fact that Labour just supported the Tory austerity cuts in today’s vote. The Labour Party cannot come along to this chamber calling for more money for every part of the public sector when its members have just gone through the lobbies with the Tories to support austerity cuts that will have an effect in this place as well as down south.
The cabinet secretary seems to forget that from 2007 to 2011 she relied on the Tories to get the SNP budget through. There is a partnership for you.
I think that that is called grasping at straws. [Interruption.]
Order.
Jackie Baillie is so aligned to and such a fan of the Tories’ spending priorities down south that, a few minutes ago, she was praising the Tories’ record on the NHS.
Let me come on to the health service, because it is an important subject and one that is dear to me. What an honour it is to be the health secretary. I do not for a moment underestimate the challenge. Duncan McNeil was right that there are challenges that we must deal with. I hope that we can sometimes do so collectively across the chamber. However, let me be clear that we are absolutely determined that all patients in Scotland should be treated as quickly and as effectively as possible, with the right care in the right place and at the right time.
We have committed to increasing funding despite Scotland’s fiscal resource budget being slashed in real terms by 10 per cent since 2010 by Westminster. We have made sure that the health resource budget has increased by 4.6 per cent in real terms since 2010. That means more money for doctors, nurses and the health service. Next year, the health service will see an uplift of £380 million, which is £54 million more than the Barnett consequentials allocated from Westminster. What does that all mean? It means more doctors and more nurses, to build on the 1,700 additional nurses that the Government has delivered.
Be under no illusion: we will protect the health service. The £12 billion that will be allocated to health next year is a lot of money, but it is what we do with the money that is important. We need to look at redesign. The integration of health and social care is one of the biggest changes in public sector reform that we have seen in a generation. We must ensure that that integration leads to the better-quality, integrated services that our older people in particular deserve to have.
As I have said many times since becoming the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Sport, we need to tackle some of the issues in our systems. Tackling delayed discharge is my top priority. Over the past weeks and months, we have been working hard with partnerships to do that, and over the next weeks and months, I will ensure that we get to a point at which we have eradicated delayed discharge from the system, because delayed discharge means that beds are not being used for people who need them and that resources in the health service are not being used to the optimum level.
The cabinet secretary said that lots of money is going into the health service, but sometimes that reflects the service’s chaotic nature: the money follows a crisis, rather than spending being planned. Ten years ago, Malcolm Chisholm instigated the Kerr review, and Kerr recommended a more preventative approach. Campbell Christie made the same recommendation five years ago. If we measure what is happening against the proposals in the Kerr and Christie reviews, can we say that we are achieving the shift from dealing with day-to-day issues to taking a preventative approach and spending the money where we need to spend it?
There are signs of a shift, but not enough is happening and we need to do more. When we talk about the 2020 vision I will have more to say about that. Mr McNeil is right that any money that we put into integration must lever in big change. Integrated partnerships across Scotland will have £7.6 billion at their disposal, which is a huge resource, and any money that we put into the system must lever in a shift in the balance of care. I am happy to work with him and anyone else to ensure that that happens.
I will use the rest of my speech to respond to points that have been made in the debate. I say to Mary Fee—it is unfortunate that she would not take interventions on this point—that comments about the so-called underspend show the paucity of Labour’s argument. Jackie Baillie was challenged with the facts, but she would not accept that every penny of the underspend that could have been redirected to public services has been so redirected.
Jackie Baillie rose—
The rest of the money cannot be transferred to public services, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend otherwise. [Interruption.]
Order, please.
It worries me greatly that the Labour Party’s finance spokesperson, Jackie Baillie, thinks that money for student loans can somehow be redirected to public services.
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
I will give you another chance to explain how you think that that is possible.
The cabinet secretary should be clear that the opportunity was lost to spend that money in year, when it was needed. There is no denying that. She has starved the NHS and others of money that they required in year by that underspend.
I call the cabinet secretary. I remind members again that they need to speak through the chair.
What the member said is absolute nonsense. You cannot spend money that is annually managed expenditure on other things—
In the following year—
Order.
As the finance spokesperson for the Labour Party, you should know that. If you do not have a grasp of those facts, that is worrying for your party. It is hypocrisy in the extreme, too, because, as members said a number of times during the debate, when you were a minister, Jackie Baillie, you presided over—
Cabinet secretary, please address your remarks through the chair.
I am sorry, Presiding Officer.
When you were a minister in the Scottish Government—[Interruption.]
Order, please.
I say through the chair that when you were a minister, Jackie Baillie, you presided over £718 million being sent back to the Treasury. John Swinney has made sure that every penny of the underspend that can be directed to public services has been so directed. Every penny has been transferred to public spending priorities, and rightly so.
I welcome Kevin Stewart’s welcome for the £65 million that is NHS Grampian’s share. It was important to address through the NRAC formula some of the hangovers from the old Arbuthnott formula, and I am proud that the Government has done that and ensured that NHS Grampian and other boards have the resources that they need. However, let me be clear: in getting those resources, NHS Grampian and others must start delivering on their targets and must improve patient care.
It is interesting that Neil Findlay had a lot to say about pay policy. At no point did he say anything about Labour’s pay policy. What we know about Labour’s pay policy is what we know about Wales, which is the only place in the UK where Labour is in power. Let us look at what Labour has done there. It did not implement the 1 per cent agenda for change pay rise for staff in Wales—[Interruption.]
Order. The cabinet secretary is concluding.
Labour members say one thing when they are in government and another thing when they are in opposition, but their record speaks for itself.
I am afraid that you must draw to a close.
I am happy to stand here and defend our public services. Our record speaks for itself; there is nothing in the Opposition’s record to speak for.
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