John Swinney will appoint a new finance secretary soon – but whoever gets the job as the unenviable task of grappling with a looming £5 billion black hole in the public finances
Today we will start to see who John Swinney will pick for his next cabinet.
While there are some new faces from the old cabinet looking to be re-appointed, we know there will definitely be a brand new finance secretary.
Dave Hawkey, a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), said: “The government needs to close that gap so something has to give.
“The question confronting Scotland is how do we want to close it?
“It is helpful to think in concrete terms, for example we are an ageing society. More of us are getting older and need more healthcare support and social care support, which will be a really significant driver of the long-term fiscal position.
“We don’t want our older relatives waiting for care, but we also need to pay for it, so we need to think about what we value as a society.
“We can talk about what it means for taxes, but this is about people’s lives. Paying more tax is the price to pay for not wanting older people to suffer.”
If the finance secretary does choose to make cuts to public services, there are a number of areas where this could land.
She said: “We need to think about cutting benefits. If you cut this, then more children will grow up in poverty which has implications for the health service.
“Around 40 per cent of people on Universal Credit are in work, and that has been pretty constant for the last few years. It is important to have in our heads that people are in jobs that don’t pay for a route out of poverty.
“Not all jobs are equal either – for example, a cleaner or a doorman in finance is paid more than those in hospitality and retail.
“We need to look at our changing spending habits too. More people are on weight-loss jabs, but what does that mean for the health service when there is less obesity and more side-effects from the drug?
“This is where the difficult conversations are going to be.”
Mr Hawkey says it is “difficult” to imagine any cuts to the health service, so suggests the cuts could be passed on to local government instead.
He said: “The Scottish Government says the public sector is too large and wants to protect frontline public services with back office efficiency.
“Those cuts could fall across local government so there are risks to further deterioration in resources which has a knock-on effect across Scotland.
“The other area is the size of the civil service. We have seen a growth in the number of civil servants because of structural changes in Scotland.
“For example, the slogan of Brexit was we send £350 million to the EU every week, but that was to pay for bureaucrats in Brussels – someone else in Scotland now has to do that work.”
