PfG 2024 - Serving Scotland
Craig DalzellServing Scotland, what exactly?The Scottish Government’s latest Programme for Government, titled "Serving Scotland", is little more than a list of platitudes covering some of the most brutal public service cuts in years coupled with a paring back of all sense of ambition in what should be a critical year of laying groundwork for the next election (if you take a short-termist political party view of things) or the rapid ramping up of actions to halt and mitigate climate change (if you'd like there to be a liveable biosphere in the next couple of generations).The PfG is divided into four of the Government’s overarching strategies so it’s worth picking them apart one by one.
1. Eradicate Child Poverty
When John Swinney came to power with this as his key (and only?) policy pledge, I asked the question that no journalist bothered to ask him during the campaign trail. “How?”. The answer still isn’t forthcoming but I’d suggest “Not like this” is at least part of it.The PfG suggests a package of small, ad hoc and disparate pots of funding and policies such as the introduction of six (just six) “Early Adopter Communities” who will trial new childcare policies, or a second round of the “Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund” (there’s no word on how large round two will be but it is expected to allocate just £80,000 per awarded grant and round one only disbursed nine grants across its active period). I’m sure that any of the kids who are involved with any of these programmes will feel some kind of benefit compared to how they would have done without but by the end of this Parliament I would expect to see a progress report showing how many of those kids have had poverty eradicated from their lives as a result. My expectation is that the number will be somewhere between “not many” and “zero”. Never mind the poor kids who don’t get access to any of those pots at all.As I said in my “How?” article, eradicating (rather than merely reducing) child poverty will take blanket, universal, systemic and systematic change to many areas of policy but on the universal side, we only seem to be going the other way. The previous First Minister Humza Yousaf was openly leery of universalism versus means-testing but Swinney appears to be actively against it. Rather than defending himself against accusations of cutting universal free schools meals as Yousaf did, Swinney has simply gone ahead and cut them and to means test free meals for some primary kids based on whether or not they claim Scottish child benefits.Let’s be clear here. No matter how good your school, your classroom or your teacher is, if you are hungry; you’re not going to learn as effectively as you can. Adequate nutrition isn’t “just” an equality issue, or a health issue, or a poverty issue, or a human rights issue; it’s an education issue too.Now that he’s committed to means-testing which children get adequately fed in school, I’d like to ask Swinney what he plans to do for the child whose parents/guardians don’t know that they qualify for social security (particularly with cuts to marketing and awareness programmes), or those who can’t navigate the system, or those who qualify but don’t want to be visibly discriminated against or bullied, or any number or other systemic failures that will lead to a child being hungry in school as a result of this cut.I’ve often praised the Scottish Government for taking a principle-led and rights-based approach to certain areas of legislation and my particular praise of the incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is on record. But this style or legislation must come with the Resources to secure those rights, government taking Responsibility for breaches of the rights and the establishment of the Relationships required to safeguard the whole system. In short, if this policy results in a child being hungry in school (which you could argue could be a breach of Articles 2, 19, 24, 27, 28, and 31 of the UNCRC), then who can someone call to restore their rights and who goes to jail if the breach remains part of Government policy?
2. Growing the Economy
Once again, we see the Scottish Government trapped by its own misguided and provably false notions of what makes a healthy economy. I don’t need to spend too much time on this basic thesis as you can just read the article I wrote recently about Keir Starmer and swap some names around. Particular mention goes though to what could well be the closest I’ll see of the extraction of an apology, both personal and to the nation, for the absolute disaster that was the ScotWind auction. Swinney has pledged to “Review Crown Estate Scotland’s governance and operating model to ensure it optimises its unique role in value creation”. Which sounds a lot like they recognise how much money Scotland lost by them applying a maximum price cap on the auction. Not that we’ll see the benefit of the relative pittance that was raised. What was promised to be the seed of a long term wealth fund for the Scottish nation has already been raided of half of its funds and Shona Robison has her eyes on “up to 100%" of the remaining half this year.Elsewhere the “Make the GDP Line Go Up” chapter, we see further pledges aimed towards the Scottish Green Freeports and the onshore “Investment Zones” that the SNP developed with the UK Conservatives. You can read the full saga of our opposition to them here. And we also, of course, see a further doubling down of the strategy to sell off all value and control over the Scottish economy to anyone who wants to buy it under the “Foreign Direct Investment” strategy that sees more profit leave Scotland as a percentage of our GDP as just about any similarly developed country on the planet with the exception of a couple of tax havens.
3. Tackling the Climate Emergency
The Scottish Government lost all credibility and pretence of leadership on the climate emergency when it abandoned its 2030 climate targets. To earn it back will take a lot more than merely promising to not break the 2045 Net Zero target. Unfortunately, this year’s PfG doesn’t do nearly enough to try to make up that lost ground. We know what Scotland needs to do to meet our climate obligations and how much of a whole-system, strategic effort it will require but, as with the child poverty strategy, what we actually see here are more single-use pots. What’s significant in this section though isn’t what’s included but what is missing. Scotland is due, by December of this year, to produce legislation to bring domestic building standards up to an equivalent of the PassivHaus standard.This would mean that newbuild housing would have energy demands some 90% less than a typical conventionally built house in Scotland and it wouldn’t cost significantly more to deliver them. It would, however, require the complete overhaul of the entire construction sector to change the focus away from profit and speed to precision engineering and regulated compliance. Despite much being said about housing in the PfG, this Bill is not mentioned anywhere despite it being pretty much foundational to everything else (the actual delivery of the policy of “providing certainty in supply chains” will depend rather heavily on whether we start building houses to Passive standards using climate-compliant materials or whether we continue to use cheap, imported plastic-wrapped products. There is currently an active consultation on the new standards and we’ll be responding to it in due course but our initial reading is that rather than being the substantial overhaul of the sector that is required, there are already signs that we’re being set up to accept the most marginal improvement to building standards possible, done in a way that minimally inconveniences those who already benefit from making you live in cold, damp, crap homes.
4. Ensuring High Quality and Sustainable Public Services
This is probably the most euphemistically phrased policy announcement I’ve ever seen given that the PfG was preceded by Shone Robison announcing £500 million worth of cuts to public services. It’s clear that the government is just going to cut everything they can get away with cutting and will do it without doing the thing that they could do to avoid almost all of it. At the SNP conference I presented a plan to members that would see Council Tax reformed (delivering a tax cut to the vast majority of households in Scotland) and the introduction of a tax on land (which would delivering revenue sufficient to have avoided the cuts announced this week). Yet the Government has ruled out using tax to get us out of this hole (claiming, falsely, that they do not have the power to do so when it’s clear that they can do it if only they are willing to give up control of the tax and their ability to bully Councils into submission). This plan was received by SNP members well enough to help two motions on wealth and land taxes to pass overwhelmingly (see Simon Barrow’s article in this newsletter for more on that). I was asked multiple times at the conference why party leadership wasn’t listening to members and I don’t have a clear answer to that other than to say that if they started, we might not be where we are now.I could have gone on – the dropping of the 2021 manifesto promise to hold a Citizens’ Assembly on local government reform, the continuing vagueness of “Community Wealth Building” (particularly in light of the FDI Profit Extraction economic model they champion, the lack of almost anything concrete to do with the National Care Service (other than to confirm that they’ll pull Anne’s Law out from the Bill and legislated for it separately), but I’m already well over any reasonable word limit for my column (thanks if you made it this far!). I haven’t even touched the idea that started this article, which was to review the PfGs from previous years this Parliament to see how many promises had actually been fulfilled. Perhaps that’s an article for next time. Perhaps some time after that, we’ll revisit this one too.