Current status: Answered by Jenny Gilruth on 5 June 2026
To ask the Scottish Government, further to the publication of the Fiscal Sustainability Delivery Plan, what proportion of the identified £5 billion fiscal gap has been closed by measures announced to date, broken down by year.
In June 2025 we published the Medium-Term Financial Strategy and the Fiscal Sustainability Delivery plan.
The Medium-Term Financial Strategy provided our assessment of the scale of the fiscal challenge over the next five years. This was £2.6 billion for resource spending and £2.1 billion for capital spending by 2029-30.
The Fiscal Sustainability Delivery Plan set out clear actions we would take to close the resource deficit, through driving forward reform and efficiencies and having a robust focus on public spending, identifying up to £2.9 billion of resource budget savings within the MTFS period. The progress of the Fiscal Sustainability Delivery Plan is monitored through internal quarterly reporting, supported by a robust governance framework. Progress on the FSDP measures will be reported externally on alongside the next Medium-Term Financial Strategy.
Building on the actions set out in the FSDP, we published Portfolio Efficiency and Reform Plans alongside the 2026 Scottish Spending Review, which set out around £1.5 billion of savings by 2028-29. These will drive efficiencies through shared corporate platforms, consolidation of public bodies, estates rationalisation and accelerated digital delivery – for example, extending ScotAccount and the NHS Digital Front Door, and moving 25% of correspondence to digital by 2030 (saving at least £100 million a year).
To address the capital spending gap, we published the Infrastructure Delivery Pipeline which is underpinned by prioritisation decisions and capital spending plans set out in the 2026 Scottish Spending Review. It sets out an affordable and deliverable pipeline of investment for the next four years.