Chamber and committees

I will come back to you on Connecting Scotland. Does anyone else want to come in that point?

Were you expecting the older demographic to use the freephone number? What are the waiting times for getting through?

On the point about the budget being cut, is that because, as Louise Coupland pointed out, it is not about getting devices out to individuals but about the training that is needed now? Is it about refocusing Connecting Scotland?

Does anybody else want to comment on Connecting Scotland?

You have highlighted what the Scottish Government is doing to tackle child poverty, but Rachel Reeves’s spending review will be coming over the horizon later this month, and substantial cuts to budgets are anticipated. How do you see that impacting on Scotland’s social security system?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has forecast that Scotland will be the only part of the UK where child poverty will drop, which is in large part due to the Scottish child payment. Given the favourable impact that it has had on reducing child poverty, why is any future increase being limited to inflation?

I welcome the fact that recorded crime has halved since 1991, but what impact will the £25 million increase in national insurance by the UK Labour Government have on Police Scotland?

To ask the Scottish Government how Scotland’s recorded crime rate compares with other areas of the United Kingdom. (S6O-04394)

Investment in growing the Scottish economy is important for the future of our country. I want to mention two issues, the first of which is Brexit.

Post-Brexit, the UK Government introduced the UK shared prosperity fund, which was meant to replace EU structural funds, including the European regional development fund and the European social fund. Those were EU funds that provided Scotland with significant financial support of about £100 million per year. However, the shared prosperity fund has been widely criticised as being inadequate for Scotland, because the funding is roughly 60 per cent smaller than the EU equivalent.

The gap is even more pronounced when we consider additional programmes such as LEADER and European territorial co-operation, which further bolstered rural and regional development under the EU framework. Once again, that is Scotland being let down by Westminster Governments that promise much but deliver little.

Just 15 months ago, the then Tory Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack, issued a press release that began:

“The UK Government’s levelling up funding in Scotland has now reached £2.92 billion”.

That included funding for the 12 city deals of £1.5 billion up to the year 2034. In January, the Economy and Fair Work Committee, of which I am a member, heard from the Labour Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Murray, that

“at the moment in terms of the money that is being put in ... We have given the commitment to the 12 city region deals.”—[Official Report, Economy and Fair Work Committee, 15 January 2025; c 8.]

Why use the words “at the moment”?

One reason might be that the spending review that is due later this month is likely to include spending cuts, and many experts predict significant reductions being made across Government departments due to the current economic climate, defence spending increases and pressure to balance the budget. The so-called levelling up agenda, which was heralded with fanfare by the previous Tory Administration, dangled a carrot of £2.9 billion for Scotland. Such funds were meant to breathe life into our towns, regenerate our high streets and bolster our local economies, but the agenda was not fully funded. The Tories overpromised and Labour has, so far, underdelivered, which is leaving Scotland to pick up the pieces once again.

We are told by Ian Murray that major decisions have to wait until the spending review, at the same time as Rachel Reeves, his Labour chancellor, is announcing plans to transform the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle into a major economic hub by investing in rail and road upgrades, research hospitals and digital tech, and by delivering high levels of research funding in order to drive collaboration between Oxford, Cambridge and London universities as hubs for life sciences. What happened to the inherited financial black hole and awaiting the spending review outcome?

I want to focus the remainder of my remarks on the broken promises in relation to the exascale supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh. In the spring budget of 2023, it was announced that funding would be made available for that next-generation AI computer. The University of Edinburgh was well placed, as it had just celebrated 60 years of computer science and artificial intelligence research. The university is already home to ARCHER2, the country’s current national supercomputer, and it has been home to the United Kingdom’s high-performance computing services for more than 30 years. It is also a partner in the National Robotarium, which is based in my constituency.

Therefore, it was no great surprise when, on 9 October 2023, the University of Edinburgh issued a press release that stated:

“The UK Government has announced the University as the preferred location for the exascale supercomputer, which will be able to perform one billion billion calculations each second.

Once operational, it will provide high-performance computing capability for key research and industry projects across the UK ... Exascale will be housed in a new £31 million wing of EPCC’s Advanced Computing Facility, which has been purpose-built as part of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal.”

Then, on 15 January 2025, Labour’s Ian Murray stated:

“When we came into office, there was a £900 million commitment to the University of Edinburgh for the exascale supercomputer but there was not a penny attached to that commitment. Therefore, some difficult decisions had to be made ... the exascale computer issue has been rolled into the spending review.”—[Official Report, Economy and Fair Work Committee,15 January 2025; c 15.]

Less than two weeks later, on 28 January 2025, the Labour Government issued a press release that was headed, “Chancellor unveils new plans to deliver the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor that will boost the UK economy.” Part of that included a new “AI growth zone”, which was announced for Culham, Oxfordshire, in order to

“speed up planning proposals and build more AI infrastructure ... This starts immediately with work starting on a brand new supercomputer.”

What happened to waiting for the March spending review—or does that apply only to Scotland?

Then, on 29 January 2025, the previous day’s announcement was amended to remove the following sentence:

“The chancellor today announced a call for expressions of interest from regional and local authorities and industry to inform the next stage of the AI growth zone programme.”

Why remove that sentence? Will the University of Edinburgh get that supercomputer? We do not know, but what we do know is that we do not need Westminster’s crumbs to be dangled and then snatched away. We need control of our own resources and destiny.

The SNP has long argued for independence. Let us decide how to level up our own communities, and let us not wait for a Labour chancellor in London to wield a red pen. My message to the UK Government is simple: honour your commitments or step aside and let Scotland build the future that our own people deserve.

Thanks, George.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My app would not connect. I would have voted yes.