Scotland Bill

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for giving way; he has been very generous. One of my concerns following what he has just said is that we are going to be legislating in this Chamber on a wing and a prayer. I have taken Finance Bills through the other place. Changes to taxation have to be looked at meticulously because they have an impact on other parts of the taxation system. I can appreciate the difficulty that the Minister is in because of the commitments made by the leaders of the three parties, but I am extremely worried that we will end up taking decisions that we cannot back out of and that will have a negative effective not just on Scotland but on the whole of the United Kingdom. Can he give me any reassurance on this?

[Lord Dunlop]

As I said, we are working very hard to get this fiscal framework agreed as quickly as we can. This House considered the tax provisions of the previous Scotland Bill on their merits but, when it did so, aspects such as the block grant adjustment had not been agreed, so there is a precedent here. However, as I said, these two processes need to come together, and that is what we are working hard to achieve.

This House will be involved in the normal way if legislation is needed to implement aspects of the framework. To help the House fulfil its scrutiny role, the order of consideration for Committee will ensure that Parts 2 and 3 of the Bill—its tax and welfare clauses—are scrutinised at the end of Committee, giving more time for the negotiations to progress. As I have already said, it is the firm intention of the UK Government that the fiscal framework should be available to both the Scottish Parliament and both Houses of the UK Parliament before the passage of the Scotland Bill is completed. I shall be happy to say more about the fiscal framework in my closing speech and I particularly look forward to listening to what the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, has to say.

The Government believe that the new powers contained in the Smith agreement provide the basis for a stable devolution settlement for Scotland. Both Governments will need to work together to ensure that the powers are used effectively. The powers in the Bill are substantial and offer real opportunities to develop Scottish solutions to Scottish issues. This is not devolution in isolation but part of a broader process that recognises the need to reflect changes in other parts of the UK and that one size does not fit all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie. She and I were a double act during the referendum and spread fear throughout the land. I shall take up one of her final points. She talked about faith and trust in the process and the vow, or the promise, or whatever you call it. I agree that Ms Sturgeon will be cracking open the champagne bottle, but whether we pass this Bill or not, she will be cracking open the champagne bottle because the one thing the SNP is very good at is whingeing. It has raised it to an Olympic sport.

I believe that a promise is a promise and should be kept, but there is something that overrides that, and it is the well-being of the Scottish people—and, indeed, the people of all of the United Kingdom. It should not be above our capabilities to sort this and get a move on with the fiscal framework. Contained within this, there are a number of traps that could cause huge damage to the Scottish economy and therefore to the Scottish people, but, as was pointed out in my noble friend Lord Hollick’s excellent speech and in the excellent document from the Economic Affairs Committee, there are real threats to the performance of the United Kingdom economy. I shall pluck one from the air: borrowing rights and borrowing costs. If they are not resolved, we could find ourselves in a Greek situation: we could be into the Varoufakis school of economics. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, who I know is a friend of Mr Varoufakis.

The faux outrage that we have had from the SNP in relation to the powers in the Bill was absolutely predictable, and it will wish to keep it going because what it is most interested in is process. The longer we keep on at process, the less we look at competence. I will come on to some of the competence issues later. The Scottish Government do not want this legislation on the statute book before the next election because if it is, they will have to say what they are going to do with it. They have powers from previous Acts that they have not used. So there are issues here which we need to address in Committee, but there are some which the Scottish people need to be made aware of because the constant undertone of whingeing and complaint drowns out those who are raising real concerns about the competence of the Scottish Government.

[Lord Maxton]

I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness has said. Will she make it quite clear that the SNP is interested only in an independent Scotland, not in devolution in any form whatever?

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

I agree with my noble friend and will come back to that point later. The debate on the fiscal framework is interesting, particularly the intervention by Professor Anton Muscatelli, who is no fan of those of us on the union side. The work by him and by the Economic Affairs Committee, and some of the comments from the Scottish Government, reveal that the Barnett formula, and the process we have had up until now, delivers the best possible deal for Scotland. It is interesting that there is now back-tracking, with people saying, “We are going to get less”, or, “We could get less” as a consequence of losing chunks of the Barnett formula. This makes the case that we were all making during the referendum campaign. The SNP was trying to get the Scots to walk away from that very formula.

The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the real significance of the fiscal framework is the no-detriment deal. I will get this in before the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, does. That deal is,

“unworkable and will simply create ongoing disputes”.

I would take this one stage further: you have to define what detriment is. You cannot conclude that something is detrimental until you have set out the parameters of what detriment means. The overall deal gives the Scottish Government the power to design a significant part of the welfare system and control income tax. We have to reflect here, in the short term, on issues of competency, because there are impacts for all of the UK and how we are perceived internationally—and the omens are not good.

This is one of the reasons why we have had such histrionics from the other place about this legislation. Audit Scotland has already revealed that the Scottish Government are running a deficit: an underspend of some £350 million. This is at a time when our health service and education system are underperforming and crying out for money. Speaking as somebody who has been a Finance Minister, it is an even greater sin to have an underspend than an overspend, because it means that you have not done your planning properly and it raises issues of competence or cynicism. What is more, we have never been given a proper explanation of why previous powers have not been used. We also have lots of examples of how money has been misspent. In the past week, there were two cases of IT systems that are not even going to be used because they were so badly specified.

The performance of individual departments within the Scottish Government also gives me real cause for concern. Many Scots are really concerned about what is happening with Police Scotland. We have had some terrible tragedies recently. I was quite astonished to discover that the Justice Minister had not met the Chief Constable for four months. That is a shocking statistic and I am really concerned about it. We have 2,000 fewer police staff in Scotland.

The other area I have a concern about is one that we in Scotland have always been extremely proud of: our health system. The headlines may be about people dying on trolleys, but behind that there has been a 0.7% fall in real-terms spending on NHS services and new hospitals in Scotland over the past six years. Bed blocking has increased from 200,000 in 2011 to more than 612,000 last year because of a lack of community support, 71% of vacancies in accident and emergency staff are unfilled for six months and 2,000 NHS nursing jobs were cut in Scotland when Nicola Sturgeon was Health Minister.

I am a proud bus driver’s daughter from Coatbridge. It is a coincidence that I am standing behind my noble friend Lord Reid of Cardowan as both of us went to the same school and both of us got our opportunities because we were given a good Scottish education that allowed us to go to university. The gap between Scotland’s most and least deprived children stands at 12% in reading, 21% in writing and 24% in arithmetic. There are 4,000 fewer teachers in Scotland and the figure that really sickens me is that fewer people from poor homes in Scotland are now able to go to university—down at less than 10% when it is more than 12% in the rest of the United Kingdom. That shames Scotland and it must be put right.

I suspect that many Members of your Lordships’ House would not be aware of the fact that the budget for bursaries and grants in Scotland has been cut by £40 million and that the total value of student debt in Scotland stands at almost £2.7 billion. It is the SNP Government’s biggest financial asset. That is absolutely shameful. Against that record of incompetence we have to look at agreeing the legislation in this House without knowing the detail of the fiscal framework.

Many of us in this House are a bit long in the tooth. We should be able to come up with ways to examine the fiscal framework in time to meet the promise before the legislation is enacted. If we cannot see the detail of the fiscal framework—if we cannot see the workings, as they used to say in primary school—if the Government would be prepared to release to us the minutes of the discussions between the UK and Scottish Governments, we would at least have a flavour of where it was going.

The noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, referred to the jollity that there would be if this Bill was not passed. In the other place there was a lot of criticism from the SNP Benches about how bad this legislation was. Yet did they put down amendments? Did they vote on those amendments? One very important amendment that my noble friend Lord McAvoy referred to was about abortion being devolved to the Scottish Parliament. They put down an amendment on that because they support it. They did not put in tellers. What could be more cynical than that? You have the amendment, you have the debate but you run away at the final hurdle because you are frightened of the nature of the debate that it will create.

I apologise that I have taken longer than the advisory time. As noble Lords may gather, I feel very passionately about this. The noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, referred to the fact that he listened to the results on the night and heard the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. I listened to the results outside Stirling—Stirling in South Australia. The next day, when I went into shops, as is my wont, people would come round the counter when they heard a Scottish accent and shake hands and say, “We are glad that Scotland is part of the United Kingdom and will continue to be part of it”. If we muck this up, that is not going to be the case.

I will shut up now and look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem—the second most beautiful place in Scotland after Coatdyke—and I very much look forward to hearing the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh.