Chamber and committees

In the interests of accuracy, will the member at the very least acknowledge that the budget is not entirely fixed, because 37 per cent of the revenue that the Government has to spend comes directly from taxes that it sets in Scotland?

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

My supplementary question addresses the Scottish National Investment Bank funding. Many people will be surprised that the deposit return scheme is receiving funding from that source, given that the Scottish National Investment Bank was meant to be about strategic priorities, addressing market failure and driving enterprise. Is it appropriate for it to be funding public policy through that means, especially given that Scottish National Investment Bank funding will decline to zero in the timeframe of the resource spending review, as was announced yesterday?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its deposit return scheme. (S6O-01179)

In yesterday’s spending review, we saw that the profile of investment for the Scottish National Investment Bank has fallen to £9 million, through to £1 million in 2025-26 and zero in 2026-27.

That will leave investment in the bank at £610 million, I believe. Will the cabinet secretary clarify what the protected capitalisation will be as a result of the spending review? I ask because, by my analysis—I am happy to be corrected—that £610 million is well short of the £2 billion that was promised. What will be the impact on the number and value of projects in which the bank will be able to invest?

—yet we have none of that, this time.

My questions are as follows. Will the Government come forward with a full and frank economic assessment of why rates of wage and productivity growth here are lagging behind those of the rest of the UK? Will it pledge to cut consultants, communications agencies and non-executive directors before front-line staff, and will it bring forward the detail—at levels 3 and 4, by portfolio—that is lacking in the spending review, so that we have the appropriate clarity?

We have waited 11 years for a spending review, yet we are getting just 30 minutes of question time and had less than 60 minutes to digest the document. For a Government that seeks to refute accusations of lack of transparency, the cabinet secretary would do well at least to begin by remarking that we must do better than that.

There are three big problems with the statement that the cabinet secretary provided. The first is the lack of context and insight. For the past three to four decades, Scotland has, typically, experienced higher rates of wage and productivity growth than the UK averages. However, over the past decade, our wage and productivity growth rates have been below the UK averages. That is a problem because of the fiscal framework, which depends on those things for the moneys that the Scottish Government has to spend. That is why there is £200 million less to spend than if income tax had not been devolved. However, there has been no acknowledgement from the cabinet secretary that the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s just-published report shows that there will be an income tax deficit next year of £359 million.

Secondly, there is no sense of the Government getting better. Ministerial salaries have doubled and the number of quangos is up by a third in the past decade, and the cost of Government has increased by £2 billion to £4.5 billion. Although the Government proposes to cut economic and enterprise support, it is finding £20 million for another independence referendum.

The final problem is the lack of data. We have waited 11 years, yet there is no detail. Eleven years ago, the spending review went down to levels 3 and 4, which gave us insight into what health boards would have to spend and into the split between university and college spend—

My understanding is that, in relation to value, the leases were sold off for just 5 per cent of the total revenues that will be generated. Does Willie Rennie agree that we have little more than platitudes from the Government in relation to securing supply chains? Is that not a failure of national wealth building, right there?

I am grateful for the minister’s commitment to the ideas that he is talking about. However, he would have to acknowledge that, despite the seven references in NSET to community wealth building, there is little in there about what is actually meant by that, or the resources that will be applied. Will establishing meanings and applying resources be a key part of the work that he is discussing?

If we were being frank and honest, and if we went around the chamber and asked every member what they meant by “community wealth building”, we would probably find a lot of very different answers. If we went outside the chamber to the street, we might find that people did not know what we were talking about at all. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to establish a consensus and a common understanding, because without that, we cannot make community wealth building successful.

However, let us be clear: in the coming years, we face huge economic challenges. We have still not understood the full costs of Covid, let alone begun to address recovery. We are in the midst of a cost of living emergency, as many Scots face spiralling costs for their heating and travel and to feed themselves.

Before those new unexpected challenges, we have the challenge of meeting our climate change targets, which creates an imperative to overhaul our economy. That need is urgent and—to be frank—it is not clear to me that either the investment or the plans are in place to enable us to meet our 2030 targets.

We need big ideas, and community wealth building could be one of those ideas. I make it clear that, beyond the challenges that I have set out, there are communities up and down Scotland that have never recovered from the loss of once-proud industries such as steel, shipbuilding, mining and manufacturing. We need answers that can address both the most recent issues and those enduring ones, which we in Scotland know only too well. We need big and bold ideas to rebuild and remake our economy. Community wealth building can and should be at the heart of that change, but we need greater clarity from the Scottish Government on its intentions and on the resources that it will bring to bear.

As I said in my intervention on the minister, there were seven mentions of community wealth building in the economic transformation plan, but there was very little clarity on what is meant by that. That clarity is what we need if we are going to make progress. I listened carefully to the minister’s speech, but we heard no detail about how community wealth building will proceed, what it means in a Scottish context as opposed to broader examples and what the first steps will truly be.