Inside Track Interview
maintenance of health-board budgets in real terms, and increased numbers of frontline police and modern apprenticeships. But with a £3.3bn real-terms reduction in Scotland’s budget over the next three years and a terrifyingly fragile UK economy, Swinney may well miss the usual horse trading and the opportunity of being able to make compromises, deals and have additional cover if things go wrong.
“I actually loved the whole process before,” he says. “It’s quite funny when you look back at the eight years before we came into office and the budget was a total non-event; it was just about more money getting spent and where it was going to be spent. Tere was no real challenge in the process because the way the previous administration worked, there was no likelihood of shifting their minds on any points, but minority Government completely changed that. “I have loved confounding everybody because they all said we would never last to the budget and then we got the first one through. Tat was going to be one of the many milestones put down for us – the big test – and we passed it. Ten we had the high drama of the budget not going through and then our instant recovery from it and that was a great learning experience too. In amongst it all, there has been a lot of good discussion and cross working with other parties and that’s been really valuable, so I am still doing that, talking to them about the shape of their priorities, because I want to make sure that the budget propositions that
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www.holyrood.com 30 January 2012
we put through as a majority government still command wide support. Some of that will be stated by others and some will be reluctant to, and that is the scope I have to operate in.” With a fixed amount of money to operate in, I wonder if it is just part of the party political process that defines the adversarial nature of the budget negotiations. “I think what you find if you look back at the budget debates of the last four years, is that broadly there was agreement on 99.95 per cent of the budget and we only ever, I only ever, had to amend the budgets by a fraction. Te largest sum of money I ever moved around in the process was about £70m or £80m which is way less than one percent of the budget – 0.25 per cent just to be accurate about it – so the measure of agreement is there about the overwhelmingly majority of what we spend our money on, but the question is whether people want to admit that or want to create a false distinction and there we are principally talking about the Labour Party. In my last budget, I went out of my way to try and get the Labour Party to accept my budget for 2011/12. I moved heaven and earth to make sure I could give them an offer which it thought would be good enough for them and reflected the things they said to me. I did all of that and they still voted against it. Tankfully there were others in parliament who were readily available and happy to have a discussion about where the budget went but there is still an element of oppositional tactics at play no matter what you have in there.”
Te morning Swinney and I meet to discuss this budget, Henry McLeish, the former irst Minister and newly installed chairman of Glasgow College, criticised Swinney’s proposed cuts to the college sector, which he then paradoxically described as ‘necessary’. “Te whole debate begs the question ‘what would you do differently?’” says Swinney. “Because if you want to give more money to the colleges then you have to take it from somewhere else and I can tell you that I never have a queue of people telling me what they would do differently. But on the colleges specifically, there is a reform programme going on in and part of that is making the college sector more sustainable in a financial climate that is going to be more challenging in the years to come. What I am interested in and the government is interested in and what many more people in Scotland are increasingly interested in is in the outcomes and whether we manage to satisfy the learning ambitions of the people of Scotland. If we can we do that with less money than it cost in an earlier financial year, then what is wrong with that? Tat is about making sure we are using our money effectively and wisely. Tere is no absolute sum of money that every public service needs to get. What we need to do is make sure we use the resources we get to deliver the outcomes that people expect.” One of the ways the Scottish Government aims to improve outcomes is by adopting a more preventative approach to spending. Successive
Photography by David Anderson
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