‘Shameless!’ SNP’s £3bn spin over cost of living crisis
They exaggerate new spending
SNP ministers were last night accused of ‘shameless spin’ after independent researchers rejected claims they have spent £3billion tackling the cost of living crisis.
Analysis published yesterday found the Scottish Government has spent just £490million on new policies to help families cope with soaring bills since the crisis gathered pace last October.
Social Security Secretary Shona Robison claimed earlier this month that the Government, whose Finance Secretary is Kate Forbes, had ‘allocated almost £3billion in this financial year to help families and households face the increased cost of living’.
But a report from the Scottish Parliament’s information centre (SPICe) yesterday noted the money included this year’s spending on policies which were introduced as long ago as 2006 – when the SNP wasn’t even in power.
Scottish Conservative social justice spokesman Miles Briggs said: ‘This exposes the truth behind the SNP Government’s misleading claims about the support it is offering hardpressed Scots during the global cost of living crisis.
‘It’s shameless spin by SNP ministers to claim pre-existing spending as part of their supposed support package.’ The SPICe analysis showed that, while all of the policies do help reduce costs for families and households in some way, ‘a list of measures announced specifically in response to the current increase in inflation would be quite a bit shorter’.
It said many of the policies ‘pre-date the cost of living crisis’, including the introduction of free bus passes for the elderly and free eye tests in 2006, abolishing prescription charges in 2011, and the expansion of free childcare in 2014.
The SPICe analysis said: ‘The single most expensive policy – at around £1billion – is for increasing funded early learning and childcare. This has been government policy since 2014. It was introduced last August because it had been delayed for a year due to Covid-19.
‘An alternative way of looking at measures “to help families and households face the increased cost of living” would be to use October 2021 as the starting point for the “cost of living crisis”. This is when the energy price cap went up and CPI inflation was 4.2 per cent.’
It said six policies costing £490million would be included on this list: free school meals during holidays; increased spending on energy efficiency schemes; an increase in the Scottish child payment benefit; a 6 per cent boost to social security benefits; extra funding to mitigate the benefit cap; and passing on the UK Government’s council tax rebate.
Scottish Liberal Democrat economy spokesman Willie Rennie said: ‘The Scottish Government are spinning like a washing machine. This is a brutal rebuke of the Scottish Government from the studiously impartial researchers at SPICe.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘As recognised in the report, Scottish Government policies are helping households both immediately, through targeted support, and helping them weather the current crisis a little bit more easily with increased access to free childcare, baby boxes, prescriptions, travel and social security payments not available anywhere else in the UK.’
‘Misleading about support’
IF household bills could be paid in spin, scottish ministers would be able to end the cost of living crisis in an afternoon, so addicted have they become to their army of publicly funded pr operatives.
Lately, the scottish Government has taken to claiming it is spending almost £3billion helping families tackle the cost of living crisis.
However, when the scottish parliament Information Centre – Holyrood’s independent fact-checker – looked into the assertion, it found the actual figure was closer to £490million.
sNp ministers have been claiming their cost of living package of support is six times larger than it actually is.
so how did they come up with the £3billion figure?
By lumping in pre-existing policies and planned expenditures and spinning them as specific to the cost of living crisis.
that this kind of dishonesty was being cooked up by scotland’s devolved government while ordinary scots were struggling to heat their homes and feed their families is beyond cynical.
more troubling is the question of what role civil servants played in the preparation and dissemination of deceptive press releases on this matter.
after all, the uK Civil service code lists the body’s four core values as ‘integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality’.
spin may simply be inescapable with this government. administrators for BiFab say ministers are ‘unlikely’ to recover £16.4million ploughed into the collapsed engineering firm.
this is not just a story of waste and poor decision-making but of headline-chasing. the scottish Government intervened at the Fife yard not just to save jobs but to buy itself some good press at the public’s expense. It ended up achieving neither.
scotland does not need a public relations operation posing as a government.
It needs a government more concerned with helping households through trying times than helping itself through difficult news cycles.