Scottish Budget Breakdown

The Scottish Budget was announced by Shona Robison yesterday, met with predictable spin as the opposition parties jostle for position. As a minority government, the SNP will have to do deals to get their budget passed, and to this extent they have offered up policies which it will be extremely hard for Labour to vote down. Here’s a brief look at some of the main points in poverty reduction measures, housing, and arts and culture (further coverage to follow).

Poverty Action

One of the standout announcements was that the Scottish government would move to scrap – or offset – the two-child benefits cap. The Child Poverty Action Group, the UK’s leading campaign group against poverty said:

“The Scottish government has made the right decision on the two-child limit, but Westminster must now step up and scrap it UK-wide. There can be no justification now for Westminster to drag its feet and continue to roll out poverty to more and more children through this policy.”

“If the PM wants families to feel improvements in their living standards, the two-child limit must be scrapped when the government’s child poverty taskforce reports in Spring.”

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have stated:

“The Scottish Government has committed to eradicate the two child limit This is a policy that increases poverty. 85% of low-income families with 3 or more children were going without essentials in the 6 months to Oct, compared to 78% for families with 1 or 2 children. This budget won’t eradicate child poverty but it does show positive signs of investing in the right things. Political choices can reduce poverty. Tough choices come down to priorities and UK Government ministers should pay close attention.”

But, as many have pointed out, the means by which this is going to actually happen isn’t at all clear. The reality is that the biggest announcement in the budget actually isn’t part of the tax or spending plans for next year. Still, its an intent and a commitment that will actually make a difference. If it goes to plan then the government will start sending out payments to families of the 15,000 children affected in April 2026.

There are also plans for:

• Funding for universal winter heating payments for older people.

• £6.9bn total investment in social security including the Scottish Child Payment.

• £2bn overall increase in frontline NHS spending, taking overall health and social care investment to £21bn, making it a third of the overall budget.

Housing

There is £768m for affordable housing, which chiefly goes to reverse a cut made under Humza Yousaf’s administration last year, but does ultimately leave spending higher and will create 8,000 new homes in the coming year.

Shelter Scotland have responded saying: “We welcome the Scottish Government‘s £768m investment in affordable homes & £4m for homelessness prevention pilots. But more action is needed to tackle Scotland’s housing emergency and to end child homelessness. Building more social homes is the only solution that can end the #HousingEmergency”

Living Rent took a harder line: “Today the Scottish Government announced £768m to buy or build 8k affordable homes next year. It is a sign it’s taking the housing emergency seriously but it is only a reverse of previous cuts. As a result, it’s a cut in real terms as same money buys less now compared to two years ago.”

The announcements are to be welcomed but this context is important: “Though it is a step forward, 8,000 homes is a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed There are 243,000 people on waiting lists in Scotland. The last decades have seen the decimation of council housing because of a lack of funding, stock transfer and right to buy.”

Arts and Culture

The same pattern can be seen in the arts, where previous cuts have been replaced and billed – with great rhetorical flourish – as breakthroughs.

Transformational Scottish Govt budget for Culture with £34m boost, includes extra funding for:
✅multi-year arts funding
✅ Screen Scotland
✅National Performing Companies & Collections
✅Festivals
✅Culture Collective
✅Sistema and YMI
✅…and more

— Angus Robertson (@AngusRobertson) December 5, 2024

The Campaign for the Arts group announced that: “The Scottish Government has significantly increased its investment in culture, improving prospects for artists and organisations at a critical moment. It follows months of campaigning and a petition backed by 18,000 Campaign for the Arts supporters.”

“The overall culture budget will increase by £42 million (14%) next year. There will be an extra: £27m for Creative Scotland to fund arts organisations
£13m for the National Collections
£2m for Screen Scotland
£1m for the National Performing Companies”

The campaign group have called it: “the biggest single increase in the culture budget in the past decade” and “Once inflation is taken into account, the increase in the overall culture budget is £34 million (11%).” But they also point out that , “in real terms, next year’s #ScottishBudget almost restores the overall culture budget to the size that it was in 2022-23.”

Predictably the Tory press and their editors and columnists went into hysteria. Presenting Swinney as a Bad Santa the Daily Mail frothed and fumed: “The SNP’s Budget has been slammed [by us – Ed] as it emerged tens of thousands of Scots will be dragged into paying higher rates of income tax, while the benefits bill will soar by £800million.”

Today we can expect another flurry of fury across Scotland’s Tory tabloids as the gatekeepers of political discourse rail against anything that doesn’t fit with their obsession with low-tax austerity economics.

The budget is a perfect example of a government doing its best, with good intentions, within the straitjacket of its own ideological thinking and the narrowness of the devolution settlement. It feels like a reset for the SNP, focusing on core issues of tackling child poverty, the NHS, housing and benefits. It also feels like, despite some extraordinary media framing, as a very difficult place for Scottish Labour, caught in the political ramifications of Starmer’s disappointing (but foreshadowed) warmed-over technocratic centrism.

In the arts and housing it seems like good news but also just reverting to previous levels of funding prior to cuts. The overall experience is of an administration trying to mitigate the worst aspects of being tied to the British state and having to offset the most egregious social policies from Westminster where they can. This is the predicament of the devolved settlement.