Alyn Smith
Main Page: Alyn Smith (Scottish National Party - Stirling)Department Debates - View all Alyn Smith's debates with the HM Treasury
Covid-19: Government Support
Alyn Smith Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP) [V]
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Mundell. I warmly congratulate my good and hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) on securing the debate, on his consistent leadership on this topic and on looking after small businesses and folks in Midlothian and elsewhere. That has been really important. I also pay tribute to ForgottenLtd and ExcludedUK, two great organisations that have worked cross-party to represent people who really have needed a voice throughout this process.
There is strong representation from the SNP in the debate because a lot of people are being let down by the UK Government at present. I pay tribute to the UK Government for what they have done, but we have to engage with them because under the current constitutional arrangements—and contrary to our worldview—the UK Treasury holds most of the purse strings. The Scottish Government have some flexibility, as does local government in Scotland, but they do not have most of the levers that we have needed, as we have seen throughout this crisis. It is important that we make sure that decisions taken on Scottish taxes mean that they are spent well—or, in this case, that the debt taken on our behalf is.
The UK Government have not been idle—I acknowledge that. A lot of these decisions had to be made at speed, and the situation has moved very fast. However, as we heard from my hon. Friend, the excuses for excluding people in the early days do not wash any more. Deliberate policy choices have excluded millions of people from Government support. We have seen corporate welfare for big organisations and organisations that were already in the system, but a lack of flexibility has meant that a lot of people have been missed out. That is curious and I find it difficult to conceive the logic, because one would have thought that the real lifeblood of the economy—the entrepreneurs, the pram shops, the company directors, the music shops and the gym owners—would have been prioritised a while ago by the Conservative party, but that is not what we have seen in reality.
I am conscious of time, but I want to make a plea of the Minister. We are very far from out of this crisis. There has been a lot of cross-party work and I am doing my best not to score party political points here. We need to find solutions for a lot of people who will need long-term support in the future. I am thinking in particular of hospitality businesses and event businesses—businesses that will struggle with the transition from furlough to non-furlough. The idea that we will be out of this crisis in a matter of weeks is for the birds. We must keep these doors open and we must be flexible about better targeted means of support for organisations. If that is the way the Minister will go forward, he will find a ready ally in the SNP, because we must find solutions. It is too important for party politics.