Chamber and committees

The Covid recovery strategy sets out three high-level outcomes, which focus on reducing inequalities and supporting people who have been most affected during the pandemic. Those outcomes, which are shared with local government, are also relevant to the Scottish Government’s on-going response to the cost of living crisis. The Scottish Government is working in close partnership with local government, Public Health Scotland and the Improvement Service to promote the shared outcomes and to consider the experiences of different people and places across Scotland. Together, we are using a range of data sources, including national performance framework indicators, to better understand and evaluate progress towards our shared outcomes.

I would very much welcome the opportunity for people in Scotland to decide on the independence question and to exercise a choice about the approach to governance that they wish to see in Scotland. We face extremely difficult challenges ahead, which have been made worse by a combination of Brexit and the United Kingdom Government’s decision making, which has had catastrophic implications for businesses and families.

Mr Kidd’s point is a substantial one with which I agree. I would welcome the opportunity for people in Scotland to exercise that choice.

The Government is committed to supporting the recovery of the tourism sector in our rural and island communities. Since the pandemic started, we have delivered packages totalling £258.5 million to support Scottish tourism and hospitality businesses. We established the rural tourism infrastructure fund to support critical projects in rural and island areas. Additionally, we have helped businesses to recover through the tourism recovery programme, which consists of 10 projects that are aimed at assisting and accelerating recovery and providing the foundations for the sustainable recovery of the sector. The new tourism and hospitality industry leadership group that we have established will drive sustainable long-term recovery.

I had an initial meeting with the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury last week, and I have sent a number of letters to the UK Government to request urgent action to address the cost of living crisis, given that the powers to properly support people and businesses are currently reserved. The First Minister also wrote to the Prime Minister last week to call for urgent action that meets the scale of the challenge, including additional funding for devolved Governments to support our people, provide fair public sector pay uplifts, and protect our public services.

We have made those calls to the United Kingdom Government. We recognised the importance of increasing social security benefits in line with inflation in April and, if we were able to see the bringing in of a permanent £25 uplift to universal credit, for example, that would make a huge difference to the circumstances of low-income households.

The Government in Scotland is, of course, taking steps in the public sector pay deals that we are putting in place to ensure that those with the lowest incomes receive the highest percentage increases. All those measures are designed to support people practically.

I assure Stephanie Callaghan that the Scottish Government is using every opportunity to engage with our United Kingdom Government counterparts to advance those important issues.

Over the past few weeks, I have had discussions with a number of Chief Secretaries to the Treasury—I had a discussion with the new one just last week. I also had extensive discussions with the previous Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities on investment zones. I have made clear the impact of the current economic crisis on people across Scotland and our economy, including the increased pressures on the Scottish budget and the vital public services that we support.

I am happy to commit to dialogue on any aspect of strategy that affects the industrial base of Scotland or any other question affecting Scotland. I respectfully point out to Mr Sweeney that there has not been a functioning UK Government for the best part of 12 months. The UK Government has literally not functioned: interaction has been appalling; dialogue has been one way; no decision making has come back from the UK Government, and what decision making it has undertaken, such as in the mini-budget, was, as Mr Sweeney and I will agree, catastrophic.

I hope that we have some degree of functioning government in the UK Government to allow us to advance the legitimate issue that Mr Sweeney has put to me this afternoon.

How consequential funding works is that the UK Government takes its decisions, the money is transferred to the Scottish Government and we publish our budget plans in extraordinary detail, with the autumn budget revision and the spring budget revision, to give a complete picture during the financial year. Mr Arthur will be going to committee shortly, once the autumn budget review is published, to explain its contents, and I have come to Parliament with two additional substantive financial statements—in early September and today—transparently setting out what the Government is doing with all the resources that are available to us.

This statement is predicated on our receiving neither an increase nor a decrease in the funds that we expect to receive from the United Kingdom Government. That risk is not just apparent on 17 November; it extends to the moment at which the United Kingdom Government undertakes its supplementary estimates, the date of which I am not yet certain.

There is risk involved in all of that. There could be an upside; equally, however, there could be an downside. I have to take decisions to properly set out the budget choices that the Scottish Government is making. At times, I have to do that without the complete picture of information that would ordinarily be available to me.

The health secretary mentions social care. The social care sector has lost thousands of employees because of Brexit. We need to have a sensible discussion about migration, because the behaviour of the Conservative Government, and especially of the Home Secretary in recent days, is directly undermining productivity in the Scottish economy.