Scotland: Devolution

Debate between Lord Purvis of Tweed and Lord Turnbull

Wednesday 29th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Turnbull]

Not necessarily. Scotland would have to bring its spending into line with England and it would be getting the same grant from the centre as England. My recommendation corrects a favourable anomaly; it is not impoverishing Scotland compared with England.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, and I do not intend to take up too much of his time. When he refers to England, is he including a calculation for London, and is he also including what is currently statistically considered as non-identifiable expenditure for defence and how that is distributed across the different nations?

[Lord Turnbull]

I was referring to identifiable expenditure, not defence expenditure. The latter, of course, runs at a very high level in Scotland, with our major bases there. I have not addressed the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, raised, which is how you deal with separate regions within England. That is a further thing that we have to address.

The other change is that the population ratios must be kept much more up to date than they have been at present. My plea, therefore, is that we start a new relationship which gives proper weight to the principle in the vow of “sharing our resources equitably” across the whole of the United Kingdom.