- By Douglas Fraser
- Business Editor, Scotland
13 minutes ago
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Nicola Sturgeon is leaving Bute House with work still to be done on the Scottish economy
- The next First Minister will have a full drawer when it comes to getting the economy moving and improving the way ministers choose their spending priorities.
- As MSPs vote on the Holyrood budget this week, outside experts are grim in their assessment of how it’s put together.
- Nicola Sturgeon also took a long time to draw attention to the disadvantages faced by female entrepreneurs.
There is still work to be done in the weeks before Nicola Sturgeon returns the Great Seal of Scotland and packs up her books at Bute House.
A lot of it has to do with, well, business. A budget to be passed on Tuesday. And the economy.
And it’s likely that Kate Forbes, and perhaps others, would want to change the low profile given to the growth of the economy under Ms Sturgeon’s leadership.
When she’s not asked to declare her Christian faith, that appears to be part of the turf on which the finance and business secretary intends to pitch her leadership campaign tent.
Her main rival, Humza Yousaf, has less success in economic roles, either as a minister or outside of politics.
As Transport Secretary he was on Ministers Bridge for two years as Ferguson shipyard headed for the rocks and his record at ScotRail was to change the course towards public property.
Tinkering around the edges
Benny Higgins, the former banker tasked with drafting a stimulus plan a few months after the first Covid lockdown, appears unimpressed by the progress of his or any other report.
He told the Financial Times this weekend that “there’s a tendency to announce a new study or a new group when there’s actually a lot of stuff that’s staring you in the face and you just have to tackle it.”
Social justice and health are perceived to be priorities for Nicola Sturgeon. And even where the outgoing First Minister has set targets that could boost the economy, there is disappointment with the track record of success.
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Kate Forbes and Humza Yousaf have differing track records in commercial roles
The Scottish Government said it will introduce pathways linking its budget to its commitment to net zero. That didn’t go well either, according to the Fraser of Allander Institute.
The economists have been asked by the Scottish Government to assess how it is doing. The reaction, published in a blog last week, was harsh. The simple thing is to point to hardware. But if the boring part about budget and decision-making processes isn’t right or not there at all, the goals will be missed.
The Allander people noted that there is a “significant gap” between government intentions and reality — for example, on project planning, the impact on equality or islanders, and not to mention which project options deliver the best social outcomes the economic one.
The economists concluded: “This is given the importance of these processes for setting clear goals, determining value for money, supporting evidence-based policy making, documenting information and ensuring that policy is in line with the overarching strategic in line with the government’s objectives, is extremely worrying.
“These processes regularly seem to lack key components, are of poor quality, are performed too late to really impact decision-making, or are missing entirely.”
It is suspected that the Scottish Government is only “tinkering around with the edges” and is therefore not taking its environmental goals seriously.
“Decisions made now secure emissions for many years into the future, and government-wide change is a slow process,” conclude the economists at Strathclyde University.
They cite the Committee on Climate Change, an adviser to the Scottish Government, who said in December that “Scotland’s climate targets are at risk of becoming meaningless”.
And they write: “Our project found that the integration of climate targets into internal processes is severely flawed and we therefore subscribe to this view. Immediate action is required if the government wishes to keep its climate targets rooted in reality. ” Ouch.
The Scottish Government’s response is to acknowledge that this net-zero challenge is complex and large in scale. It says it is working on its budget and remains “continuously ambitious”. All of this may be true, but it is not.
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Scotland will “well miss” its target of decarbonising domestic heating, says WWF
So what about growing business? You might have expected Nicola Sturgeon to at least make sure women get a helping hand in starting businesses. And yet it wasn’t until a week after she announced her departure that the issue was addressed by another review.
This was created by the First Minister with small technology companies in Midlothian as leadership competition was ignited elsewhere. Commenting on support for women starting businesses, his co-author, investment specialist Ana Stewart, said: “I’m shocked myself at the size of the gap, really.
“Only one in five businesses in Scotland is run by women and that hasn’t changed in the last 10 years.
“Although people think progress is being made, nothing in the stats we looked at – and they are very robust stats – tells us that progress is being made.”
So there are 31 recommendations – not all for the government, of course. Greater challenges lie in the financial sector, while women receive only 2% of seed funding provided by institutional investors.
Other business lobby groups are more interested in seeing where the SNP leadership candidates will go with measures in the pipeline related to health and the environment that will introduce a new regulatory burden, particularly for the hospitality sector – alcohol advertising , food marketing and beverage container recycling.
As they all agree that independence is a good thing (they know the constituency in this contest), will that make them different from each other and from Nicola Sturgeon?
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