SNP to slash £600m from public services

SNP ministers will next week cut up to £600 million from Scotland’s public services — the equivalent of a third of the annual policing budget — in a brutal round of cost-saving, The Sunday Times can disclose.
John Swinney, the first minister, has signalled the sheer scale of cuts to come, saying he was brought “down to earth” by his first briefing on the financial position facing the country.
His finance secretary, Shona Robison, is expected to slice spending by between £500 million and £600 million on Tuesday, according to senior Scottish government sources. Robison’s financial statement will also include the movement of more than £1 billion within the budget before Swinney’s first programme for government.
Swinney said he was given a dire warning about the state of the public finances by John-Paul Marks, the permanent secretary, soon after he replaced Humza Yousaf in Bute House in May. “The first briefing I got — talk about bringing you down to earth … I was in the door an hour and I could see how difficult it was,” he said.
Since taking office in London, Labour leaders have claimed that they were unaware of how bad the public finances were before the general election in July. Swinney has dismissed this as “complete baloney”.
Swinney, who was Scotland’s finance secretary for nine years, has tried to blame Westminster for the funding crisis his administration is facing, while opposition leaders and independent fiscal watchdogs have questioned the SNP’s stewardship.
In June, The Sunday Times revealed that hundreds of millions of pounds of European Union funding is being handed back to Brussels because the Scottish government failed to allocate it to economic or anti-poverty projects.
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The Scottish budget funds Police Scotland to the tune of £1.6 billion every year. It also spends £648 million annually on prisons, £643 million on colleges and £494 million on dentistry. The total tax take from land and building transaction tax in 2023-24 was £427 million.
Swinney will on Sunday signal to the SNP conference that further assistance is coming for families in need despite the spending cuts. In his first keynote address since taking charge of the party, for a second time he will say: “I will signal how we can tailor support better to families, ensuring the help they need, when they need it, to lift the families out of poverty.
“This support, this whole family support, will not have the immediate effect of ending the two-child cap, but it is an example of the sustained smarter policy-making we are delivering in government.”
The SNP conference is taking place following a devastating general election for the party, which resulted in the party losing 39 MPs.
In a closed-door election post-mortem on Friday, Swinney laid out what he believed caused the defeat, which saw the SNP fall to just 9 MPs from the 48 returned in 2019, including a failure to appeal to middle-class voters.
The nationalists will now attempt to combine humility and contrition with a degree of optimism they hope will keep them in the race to remain in government after the 2026 Holyrood election.
Stephen Flynn, the SNP Westminster leader, told the party conference that “hiding from that harsh reality will fix nothing”. He said: “Our job is to face up to that result and accept the true depth of our defeat. Because the right response never lies in easy excuses — the only right response is rooted in reflection and responsibility.
“Because the brutal honesty of democracy means that we need to be brutally honest with ourselves. It wasn’t our political opponents, and it wasn’t the media, who sent us a stark message at the general election. It was the people we serve.”
Michael Marra, Scottish Labour’s finance spokesman, said Swinney was “taking a hatchet to Scotland’s public services, and he has no one to blame but himself”.
He added: “Seventeen years of incompetence has led to low growth, incredible waste and chaos in our public finances. It is simply wrong that Scots are being left to pick up the tab of SNP failure. While the SNP shift the cost of their failure on to the shoulders of working Scots, it is clear they are out of ideas and running out of time.”
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During a question-and-answer session with journalists, Swinney said he would continue to push for independence and indicated that he would not reduce the Scottish government’s budget for constitutional change.
Craig Hoy, chairman of the Scottish Conservatives, condemned the protection of the independence unit in the face of cuts to other services across the country.
“It is disgraceful that at a time of declining standards in our schools, with job cuts to teachers, NHS waiting lists rising and councils on the brink of collapsing, the SNP are hellbent on spending taxpayers’ money on their independence obsession,” he said.
“While they choose to throw money down the drain on independence, winter fuel payments for pensioners have been scrapped and core funding for essential services is falling behind other parts of the UK, all as a direct result of the SNP’s financial mismanagement.”