Harriet Cross

Devolution sounds like, and should be, a fantastic opportunity. It should bring decisions closer to home with policies that fit the uniqueness of local areas and communities such as mine, where accountability and impact are more closely linked. That is the theory but in practice, certainly in Scotland’s case, the reality is very different. Devolution has become a fight for power—for the power, but not for the responsibility—and it has become about pushing party and personal ideology rather than what is actually best for the public and the businesses which we are meant to serve. Since 1999, we have seen so much power, indeed more power than any other devolved nation in the world, devolved to Scotland, or more specifically, as others have mentioned, to Holyrood, because that is where in Scotland devolution ends. What we see in Scotland is a level of bureaucracy, red tape and top-down decision making that stifles any opportunity for devolution to properly trickle down to benefit all regions and communities across Scotland. We can look at the evidence. In Scotland, 53% of planning decisions appealed to the Scottish Government are overturned by Ministers; in England, by contrast, local decisions are upheld 70% of the time. On policing, the SNP merged eight regional police forces into one nationalised central body. In doing so, it scrapped local police boards run by local councils and replaced them with a single national authority appointed by, and accountable to, Scottish Ministers. The result is that since its creation over 140 stations have closed, creating what the Scottish Police Federation has itself called policing deserts and an “almost invisible policing presence” across great parts of the country. There are also of course endless examples of devolution putting our businesses at a disadvantage compared with others across the UK, including on business rates. Business rates are devolved and when the last Conservative Government introduced 75% rate relief for hospitality south of the border, that was not replicated in Scotland. Businesses in Scotland had to wait years for a similar relief, which, when it was finally introduced, was less generous than elsewhere. In education we have seen years of decline in Scottish standards. In 2006, Scotland proudly had students who were the best in the UK at maths. But now, after years of the SNP curriculum for apparent excellence, our PISA score has plummeted by 35 points and we are trailing well behind England. That is a generation of young Scots being failed by the SNP. Why in Scotland, after almost 20 years in office, has the SNP seemingly been so content to let education standards slip and slip while over the past decade, when Conservatives were in government at Westminster, we saw standards and international rankings rise south of the border? Why, other than for the need to just do things differently, would we not look at the rising standards elsewhere in the UK and think for just one minute that maybe for the sake of the next generation of Scots we could learn from what is happening elsewhere in the UK? There is also a huge amount of incoherence between different policies in devolved areas. Pensioners in Scotland with an income of £35,000 are considered to have a low enough income to be eligible for the winter fuel payment, which of course is welcome after Labour decided to balance their books on the back of our poorest pensioners, but how does this square with the SNP Government considering workers on a salary as modest as £30,000 to be wealthy enough to be taxed more than those in the rest of the UK? Was devolution really set up as a vehicle to see teachers and doctors and police officers based and working in Scotland taxed more and taking home less pay than those doing the same job in the rest of the UK? For devolution to be considered a success, we should be able to see it and feel it, but even objectively these benefits are very hard to find. I know there have always been those saying and pointing out that we get things for free, like free prescriptions or certain bus travel or university education, but these are not free; they are taxpayer-funded—funded at the expense of something else and funded at the cost of higher taxes for people and businesses across Scotland. The Scottish Government are receiving from the UK Government over £2,500 more per person to spend than is the case in England. Why then are our outcomes not streaks ahead of those south of the border? Why is our education system failing children? Why are universities almost at the point of collapse? Why is life expectancy lower in Scotland and our drug deaths the highest in Europe? Why are NHS capital projects being paused, including the Ellon health centre in my constituency? There is chronic underfunding and under-investment in our roads, including the A96 and the A90 in Gordon and Buchan. Scotland’s employment rates are lower than those in the rest of the UK. Why are local authorities on their knees due to a lack of funding? If devolution had been made to work for Scotland, it would surely be at least equal to the rest of the UK in all those regards. If successive Scottish Governments had focused on their job and on actual devolved competences, maybe—just maybe—Scotland would have outperformed the rest of the UK, but it has not. Why? Because since devolution, successive Scottish Governments have not wanted to take the responsibility as well as the power. They have preferred to point fingers to cover their own incompetence, rather than hold themselves accountable. If what I describe had happened, or even begun to happen, over the last 25 years, maybe devolution could be seen as a success for Scotland. Until that does happen, I struggle to accept that it has been.