Comprehensive Spending Review

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

But it was the stated policy of the previous Government to increase social rents over time to approach the level of market rents—[Interruption.] That was the policy of the previous Government. As I have said, we have tried to do this in a way that protects existing social tenants. It will help to build more social housing, and in the end the Opposition have to ask themselves why they failed so miserably on building social housing.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

The Chancellor has announced 500,000 job losses and cuts of £81 billion—that is just the cuts, not the tax increases—while giving no detail of how that will be achieved. This will cause huge anxiety among those in the public sector and those who depend on their services, and in the private sector firms that are dependent on public sector contracts. I believe that this is reckless: it cuts too fast and too deep. I have one question today: how can the Chancellor possibly imagine that, after his statement, a real-terms, direct cut to the Scottish block of around £4 billion can do anything other than weaken the ability of Scotland to recover in these difficult economic times?

[Mr Osborne]

First, we have preserved the Barnett funding arrangements. Secondly, the decisions that we have taken on the national health service and schools budgets in England will help the funding settlement for Scotland. What we are seeking to do, north and south of the border, is to put the United Kingdom’s economy on a strong and sustainable footing so that there can be growth in Scotland and in the rest of the country. My final observation is that people are pretty clear, in the House and in Scotland, that if Scotland had been independent over the past three years, given the scale of the banking crisis, it would now look like Iceland.