Devolution in Scotland

Debate between Euan Stainbank and Chris Murray

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Euan Stainbank]

I imagine the people of Wales choose to vote in the same ways as the Scottish people do for the Scots. My hon. Friend the Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman) put it very well: simply picking a different nation in the UK to tackle our policy issues is getting exhausting, especially on the nationalist Benches.

Not all but part of the problem with the failure to close the attainment gap, as many Members have mentioned, and a broader loss of trust in our politics, were due to disproportionate budget cuts that have landed at the door of local authorities. Having been a councillor for two and a half years, I know that they are at the coalface delivering the services in which our constituents have most acutely seen the evidence of decline. Even though council tax had been frozen for 11 out of the last 17 years of budget settlements, I was completely surprised at the stunt at the 2023 SNP conference which left councils with both arms tied behind their backs. The challenges we see in social care and infrastructure are tied in with local authorities. This is where politics is most tangibly felt by our constituents and it is currently failing them. Even with a £5.2 billion increase secured by us on these Benches for Scotland, Falkirk Council was allocated only an additional £5 million in revenue funding this year from the Scottish Government. Where has the rest of the money gone, John?

Colleges in Scotland, as again my hon. Friend the Member for Alloa and Grangemouth touched upon, are at crisis point. With years of systematic underfunding from the Scottish Government seeing a 20% real-terms cut in funding over the past five years, many colleges have now shrunk their staff numbers and offered fewer courses for working-class students at a time when the skills they provide are at their most valuable. Forth Valley college has been put in the position of being an essential provider of training and skills, while Grangemouth undergoes an industrial crisis and requires major investment for transition. It is a hugely valuable local provider of jobs, opportunities and training, yet it is now consulting on the closure of its Alloa campus. Things are going in the wrong direction. Scotland’s civic infrastructure should have been enhanced and resilient and protected by devolution, but in too many places it has not been protected.

On the situation at Alexander Dennis, when it announced its consultation on 400 jobs and closing its only site in Scotland, there was, to their credit, engagement eventually from the Scottish Government, but that was 10 months after the company initially suggested it was going to depart Scotland if something was not done about the scandalous ScotZEB 2 scheme— Scottish zero emission bus challenge fund—sending less than 20% of orders to Scotland’s sole manufacturer. However, there have been improvements in how we in this place, under this Labour Government, work with the Administration in Edinburgh. As the Deputy First Minister accurately pointed out recently, the swift engagement from my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) in his time as Scottish Secretary was invaluable in ensuring that the conversation progressed quickly.

The truth is that when that sort of crisis arrives in one of our industrial assets—something we should all intrinsically value: a bus manufacturer that has existed long before the inception of the Scottish Parliament and long before any of us were around—action should have been taken much earlier, at strategic level, designing procurement through the powers the Scottish Parliament have to retain a pipeline of orders funded by taxpayer money for buses built in Scotland, not built in China.

[Chris Murray]

My hon. Friend is eloquently setting out a whole host of policy challenges that we face in Scotland, whether they are in industrial strategy, opportunities for the young or the provision of further education. Does he agree that when the Government of Scotland say that the answer to every single one of those challenges is independence, that shuts down any thinking on what we actually need to do to tackle the challenges and denudes Scotland of the ability to think through how we deal with the real issues that we face in our communities?

[Euan Stainbank]

I agree. It also undermines the message in section 1 of the Scotland Act 1998 that there shall be a Scottish Parliament with the powers to fix policy challenges. It is the reason we are proud devolutionists in this place: we want a Scottish Parliament that can address the issues under its competency. I agree that that reaction does shut down debate; it shuts down the idea that there is something better that we can achieve in all of our constituents’ interests.

As I said on Alexander Dennis, we should never have been in a position where a company warned about the loss of a critical and necessary industry in Scotland, especially as we seek to achieve our net zero goals, and it took over a year for decisive action to be taken to prevent it, albeit I welcome that. A devolved Government with a serious interest in standing up for Scotland beyond its being a slogan would not and should not have let it get to that point. Across this place, in the Scottish Government and in our councils that have been hard-pressed for far too many years under a Government who I hope get replaced next year, we must do better. Scotland demands better and Falkirk demands better.