Ministers fritter away our money then wonder why we want to know how that happened

VALUE for money is at the forefront of everyone’s minds these days, with the cost of living crisis forcing us to stretch our budgets tighter than ever before. Yet, while Scottish households cut their cloth to suit their means, the same can’t be said of the Scottish Government. Audit Scotland’s report on the consolidated accounts underscores a perverse situation: a £2billion underspend alongside a series of costly blunders.

To make matters worse, the man in charge of keeping a close eye on our cash, the Auditor General, has raised concerns about the lack of transparency when it comes to SNP spending.

Governing Scotland is an expensive business. Scottish ministers spent £49billion last year – a third going on health and social care and another third to social justice, housing and local government.

Among the other priorities were education, justice and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite these significant investments, ministers left £2billion unspent. It meant that while the constitution, external affairs and culture portfolio went overbudget, spending on education and skills came in £806million under budget.

Ministers say this is a ‘non-cash saving’ that reflects the way student loans are paid and isn’t money that can be spent on other things. They say the true underspend is £650million. Not a trifling amount either.

However, that doesn’t account for the half a billion left unspent in the finance and economy portfolio. This, Audit Scotland chalks up to ‘underspends in relation to Covid-19 business support grants, self-isolation grants and lower demands on business ventilation funds’.

Fraught

While falling demand for Covid support happily reflects our journey out of the pandemic, small business owners have not forgotten how fraught times were last year. They needed every last penny of help they could get and will struggle to understand why any business support cash had to go unallocated.

More galling is where money has gone out the door that didn’t need to.

Take the ferries fiasco. Ministers wrote off a further £52million from the value of Ferguson Marine last year, while the combined value of the two still-incomplete vessels was listed at £78million.

The price tag for the ferries now exceeds a quarter of a billion pounds, more than double the contracted price.

Then there’s Prestwick Airport, nationalised in 2013. It has so far received loans totalling £43million, but its value is around a quarter of that.

Elsewhere, the Scottish Government has poured £51million into BiFab, only for its equity share to be valued at zero and additional loans written off.

Meanwhile, a 25-year financial guarantee to Lochaber Aluminium Smelter has left the Scottish Government exposed for up to £32million annually.

Ministers usually protest that they were trying to save jobs, a laudable aim, but the numbers do not lie.

As Audit Scotland concludes: ‘Financial support for these four companies has not delivered expected outcomes and is unlikely to achieve value for money.’

Remember the botched census? The one that had to be extended because the response rate was so low it could have rendered the statistics worthless? That cost an extra £6million. Auditor General Stephen Boyle says it is ‘important that National Records of Scotland establishes why the return rate was significantly lower than other countries in the UK’.

One of the reasons might be the decision to politicise the census by attempting to conflate data on sex and ‘gender identity’. Ministers were repeatedly warned this would undermine the robustness of the information gathered.

Finding their concerns ignored, some women may well have refused to complete the forms on principle. This was entirely avoidable, but avoiding it meant the Scottish Government listening and accepting it wasn’t always right, neither of which was ever going to happen.

We might add to this damning dossier the £20million set aside for independence. The Supreme Court has already ruled it unlawful for Holyrood to hold a referendum absent of Westminster’s permission, but Nicola Sturgeon has not reallocated the funds to other priorities.

This is a purely political decision. Scrapping the independence budget would be an admission that the independence cavalcade is en route to the scrapyard.

You might think keeping a couple of billion under the mattress and splurging on a dead referendum is an odd way to behave for a government that claims to be kept in penury by the Scrooges at Westminster. Thankfully, though, Scottish ministerial talking points bear little resemblance to Scottish fiscal realities.

The report warns that the Scottish Government is ‘facing an intensely challenging period in managing its finances’, in part because of the current economic crisis and limits on public finances but also due to ‘stretching policy commitments’. One of the difficulties in assessing the Government’s performance against spending is the fuzziness of the overall financial picture.

So, for example, we know the UK Government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) overpaid almost £68million in benefits to Scottish recipients last year as a result of fraud or error. We don’t know the figure for Social Security Scotland (SSS), the SNP’s version of the DWP, because it does not provide an estimate.

Audit Scotland warns: ‘This assessment is becoming urgent as the value of benefits administered by SSS increases rapidly over the coming years.’

Why does the national auditor have to make a plea like this? Why doesn’t the agency provide a fraud estimate as standard, a calculation done routinely in welfare departments around the world?

Transparency

Then again, openness and accountability aren’t priorities with this government. It is allergic to scrutiny – of their financial management as with everything else. No wonder the auditors state: ‘The Scottish Government needs to improve the quality and transparency of its financial and performance reporting.’

I do so hate to be vulgar but, ministers, this isn’t your money we’re talking about. It’s our money. We worked for it. We pay it in taxes – including an income tax with a top rate higher than anywhere else in the UK – and all we ask is that you spend it wisely and be transparent about it.

That you seem unable or unwilling to do either is troubling.

Before the chorus of whataboutery strikes up, yes, the UK Government spends unwisely and makes costly blunders too. We know it does because it is held to account by Parliament.

The measure of whether Scottish ministers are doing their jobs properly is not how improperly ministers in other governments are doing theirs. It is of no comfort to be told that your tax money is being squandered on a more modest scale than elsewhere. The test of Scottish ministerial performance is how well ministers perform in Scotland.

When it comes to managing public finances, Scottish ministers continue to fail largely without consequence. When it comes to transparency, they barely even try. We are ruled by people who take our money, fritter away great wodges of it and cannot believe we have the audacity to ask how it happened.

When Holyrood was handed more fiscal powers in 2012 and 2016, there was a lot of nose-tapping clever talk about how this would bounce the SNP into being more financially responsible.

As with so many of the promises of devolution, this is another one to reflect on ruefully while observing the state of government in Scotland today.