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Chamber and committees

Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.  

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Dates of parliamentary sessions
  1. Session 1: 12 May 1999 to 31 March 2003
  2. Session 2: 7 May 2003 to 2 April 2007
  3. Session 3: 9 May 2007 to 22 March 2011
  4. Session 4: 11 May 2011 to 23 March 2016
  5. Session 5: 12 May 2016 to 5 May 2021
  6. Current session: 12 May 2021 to 5 July 2025
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Displaying 899 contributions

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Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

General Question Time

Meeting date: 26 June 2025

Ivan McKee

The Scottish Government has no current plans to reform the planning appeals process, which it considers to be robust, fair and efficient.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

General Question Time

Meeting date: 26 June 2025

Ivan McKee

No. I cannot comment on any individual cases, but the right to appeal is a long-standing and important feature of the planning system. All appeals are determined on their merits and on the same legal basis as a planning application, in accordance with the development plan, unless material considerations indicate otherwise. If an application goes to appeal, parties that have made representations on it are given the opportunity to confirm their objection or support. That is a well-established part of our system, and I do not want to take steps to change it.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

General Question Time

Meeting date: 26 June 2025

Ivan McKee

The Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997, as amended, requires planning authorities, when preparing their local development plans, to consider the

“housing needs of ... persons undertaking further and higher education”.

That will inform the allocation of land for development and decisions on individual planning applications. We have no plans to amend that legislation.

Planning authorities can prepare guidance to support their plans. For example, the Glasgow city plan guidance sets out a clear framework for supporting purpose-built student accommodation in appropriate locations and identifying areas of concentration where further development would undermine residential amenity.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

General Question Time

Meeting date: 26 June 2025

Ivan McKee

As I indicated, local authorities, including Glasgow City Council, are able to identify areas of concentration where further development would undermine residential amenity. That power already exists. There is also a power for local communities to produce local place plans to feed into local development plans.

We should recognise, as I think Pauline McNeill does, that students who are studying at our colleges and universities are a hugely important part of society. I welcome international students and the making of provision for them, and any PBSA provision obviously takes pressure off the private rented sector, which I think we would all agree is to be welcomed.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

General Question Time

Meeting date: 26 June 2025

Ivan McKee

As I have said, we want to provide accommodation for students, and PBSA takes pressure off the private rented sector and other parts of the market. However, as I have indicated, local authorities already have the power to identify areas where they feel that further development would undermine residential amenity and to build that into their local development plans. Planning is, of course, delegated to local authorities in that regard.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

Budget (Provisional Outturn 2024-25)

Meeting date: 24 June 2025

Ivan McKee

The £72 million capital underspend in transport and the £27 million underspend on the trunk road network reflect forecasts across a range of programmes, including the M8 Woodside viaduct propping project, that are facing a number of challenges through the financial year because of the complexities of those works.

If Liz Smith has not gone to visit those works, I encourage her to do so in order to learn about the challenges that doing that work in a city centre location presents to the excellent teams that are carrying it forward. That work is of course reprogrammed into 2025-26, so whether there is a delay or not, it does not affect the amount of work that gets done.

There is also a rail services underspend: Network Rail has underspent £22 million on operations, maintenance and renewals. That is driven by the rephasing of national Network Rail programmes, where costs are allocated to the Scotland region, although it is obviously something that we carry out ourselves.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

Budget (Provisional Outturn 2024-25)

Meeting date: 24 June 2025

Ivan McKee

I welcome the opportunity to update Parliament on the provisional outturn against the budget for the financial year 2024-25. The provisional outturn demonstrates once again that this Government is prudently and competently managing Scotland’s finances while protecting our priorities and ensuring that we have sustained effective delivery of public services.

Once again, managing the financial position for 2024-25 was a challenge. The continued impact of inflation, pressure on public sector pay and wider geopolitical instability meant that careful consideration had to be given to balancing the Scottish budget. As members know, we cannot overspend our budget, even by a single penny, and we cannot underspend in excess of the Scotland reserve limit, which is just over £700 million. Over and above that, we have limited fiscal levers and cannot borrow to meet day-to-day costs. Savings remain our main source of funds for managing emerging pressures. In September 2024, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government set out to Parliament the difficult choices that were being taken.

Stronger overall provisional revenue performance from the fully devolved taxes than initially forecast, together with the additional funding that was received from the United Kingdom Government last October and the spending controls that we introduced, enabled us to achieve the cabinet secretary’s stated aim of removing all use of ScotWind revenues to support the wider budget in 2024-25. That has allowed us to target those revenues on investments in a range of net zero projects for the longer-term benefit of Scotland. Resource borrowing was also eliminated, which reduces the cost of borrowing that future budgets will need to fund, while capital borrowing was significantly reduced. All those actions help to ensure that we remain fiscally sustainable.

However, the outlook is still challenging. New threats to economic stability continue to emerge at a global level. We continue to see inflation above the Bank of England target of 2 per cent, which puts pressure on public sector pay deals to ensure that pay remains fair and competitive.

The UK Government spending review, which was announced on 11 June, confirmed that the rate of growth in the block grant had fallen below previous expectations, with the block grant growing by only 0.8 per cent in real terms year on year, which is considerably lower than the 1.5 per cent average growth in UK departmental spending. In addition, changes to employer national insurance contributions have not been fully funded for Scotland, and UK Government changes to benefit policy are expected to have a significant negative impact on funding in future years.

The impact that those changes will have on our financial planning will be set out to Parliament tomorrow in the medium-term financial strategy, but growing pressures in future years mean that we must act prudently and responsibly to remain fiscally sustainable.

Despite those challenges, we have continued to deliver for Scotland. In 2024-25, we supported fair and affordable pay deals for workers who provide our essential public services, thereby securing the continuity of those services and minimising the need for the sort of costly action that we saw in other parts of the UK. As the UK pay review bodies have recently demonstrated, current global socioeconomic pressures mean that Governments must look beyond their original budgeted costs. By using effective financial management, we were able to offer pay deals that were £600 million greater than planned.

In 2024-25, we invested more than £5.9 billion in social security assistance, which directly supported more than 1.4 million people across Scotland. That figure included the allocation of £456 million to the Scottish child payment. That benefit, which is unique to Scotland, helped around 328,000 under-16s and lifted an estimated 60,000 children out of relative poverty in 2024-25.

Following successful pilots, the carer support payment and the pension-age disability payment were extended nationally, ensuring that carers and individuals with disabilities of pension age now receive regular support in all areas. We also introduced the Scottish adult disability allowance, which replaces the UK disability living allowance and benefits more than 430,000 disabled people.

Scotland’s economy and labour market have remained resilient despite challenging economic headwinds. Scotland’s economy grew by 1.2 per cent in 2024, compared with growth of 1.1 per cent in the UK as a whole, and it strengthened from 0.5 per cent growth in 2023. Scotland’s claimant count unemployment rate was 3.5 per cent in May, which remains below the UK rate of 4.5 per cent, and our median monthly pay for payrolled employees in Scotland, which was £2,542 in May, remains higher than the figure for the UK as a whole.

Scotland continues to show the largest long-term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of all the UK nations, and we are committed to achieving net zero by 2045. In 2024-25, we spent £16.2 million on just transition fund activities, brought the new-build heat standard into force, delivered an additional 1,623 public charging points for electric vehicles and restored 14,860 hectares of degraded peatland. We also passed the landmark Circular Economy (Scotland) Act 2024, thereby establishing the legislative framework to support Scotland’s transition to a zero waste and circular economy. That is complemented by our circular economy and waste route map to 2030, which will help us to achieve our sustainable resource and climate goals.

We have continued to support and deliver genuine efficiencies across the public sector through a range of programmes to save on corporate expenditure, including the national collaborative procurement framework’s commercial value for money and digital programmes, which are securing cost-avoiding and cash-releasing savings that are expected to reach more than £0.5 billion by the end of 2026-27.

In 2024-25, we also launched property controls guidance to support a more efficient approach to public sector property management and to optimise costs and estate footprint. Since 2022, enhanced recruitment controls have controlled growth in the total Scottish Government workforce, reducing it by 5 per cent between March 2022 and March 2025.

Turning to the 2024-25 provisional outturn, I am pleased to confirm that the Scottish Government has once again delivered a balanced budget, with a provisional fiscal outturn of £52.1 billion against a total fiscal budget of £52.7 billion. The remaining £557 million, which represents just over 1 per cent of our total budget, will be carried forward in full through the Scotland reserve if that figure is confirmed at the final outturn. That incorporates £501 million of fiscal resource, £31 million of capital and £25 million of financial transactions.

I again reiterate that there will be no loss of spending power to the Scottish Government as a result, with that funding supporting 2025-26 costs. We cannot overspend. The fiscal rules that we must comply with mean that we must plan for a modest underspend—we must be able to mitigate the risk of post year-end audit adjustments and to manage any late movements in demand-led programmes and fully devolved tax receipts, which have occurred in previous years.

We have already made clear to Parliament our intention to set aside the majority of that underspend as part of our spring budget revision, with £350 million planned to be held within the finance and local government portfolio. Indeed, we operate on an annualised budget, but our activities do not abruptly end on 31 March and then commence anew on 1 April each year. Smoothing through the Scotland reserve over financial years is therefore to be expected. The fact that we have managed the position to a 1 per cent underspend underlines the Government’s financial competence.

I also remind colleagues that there remains a non-cash element of our budget allocation, which is utilised for accounting adjustments, such as depreciation. That element is ring fenced and cannot be used to support day-to-day spending. As non-cash expenditure, it does not flow through the Scotland reserve and is therefore excluded from the headline provisional outturn results. For 2024-25, that shows an underspend of £738 million against a budget of £1.8 billion. A large proportion of that relates to non-cash consequentials for student loan impairments, which are simply not required at the same level in Scotland because of our policy of free university tuition.

The figures that I have reported to Parliament today remain provisional, as they are subject to change pending completion of the 2024-25 year-end audits. Finalised figures will be reported as usual in the annual Scottish Government consolidated accounts and a statement of total outturn later this financial year. I commend today’s figures to Parliament.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

Budget (Provisional Outturn 2024-25)

Meeting date: 24 June 2025

Ivan McKee

It is important that we have the ability to take forward capital investment. The rules that the UK Government has in place can make that a challenge. There have been fluctuations in capital budgets over a number of years, which have involved reductions then reinstatements. That has been problematic for our ability to predict and understand how we can adequately support the programme of investment that we rightly take forward on behalf of the people of Scotland.

It is important that we have stability when it comes to capital budgets and that we are able to plan adequately and securely into the future. The lack of borrowing powers for the Scottish Government makes that difficult. We call on the UK Government to provide additional borrowing powers, to enable us to plan and execute our very important investments.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

Budget (Provisional Outturn 2024-25)

Meeting date: 24 June 2025

Ivan McKee

I thank Kenny Gibson for his kind words about the job that we have done. He is absolutely right: the underspend is only just over 1 per cent of the total spend. As I have said, that is a lower underspend percentage than occurred across the rest of the UK.

On capital projects, I wish it were that easy. Those budgets are allocated to portfolios, then to agencies and projects. Those projects do not stop on 31 March then restart in April. They continue from day to day. There is some slippage in the expenditure on those projects. However, the work does not stop, and the expenditure needs to carry on. The ability to pull that money back in the last few days of the financial year, allocate it to something else then reallocate it in April would be problematic, to say the least. However, I take Kenneth Gibson’s point: the ability to have shovel-ready projects—which we have—that can be brought in when we have additional money to spend is an important step to take.

Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]

Budget (Provisional Outturn 2024-25)

Meeting date: 24 June 2025

Ivan McKee

Under the fiscal framework, the Scottish Government can access limited resource and capital borrowing and has the use of the Scotland reserve. The Scottish Government’s borrowing powers, though improved by the fiscal framework, remain extremely limited. For example, resource borrowing is still limited to addressing forecast errors in tax or social security payments and cannot be used to fund day-to-day expenditure, and the current cap on the Scotland reserve limits our ability to carry forward funds into future financial years.

We want to work with the UK Government to secure greater fiscal flexibilities to support sound financial management and to deal with volatility. The Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government will discuss those issues further at the forthcoming meeting of the UK finance interministerial standing committee.