Baroness Coffey
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Spending Review 2025
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 days, 20 hours ago)
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Lord Livermore (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for giving me the feedback that he is receiving. He is absolutely right to highlight the incredibly important things we have done in the spending review for Scotland, such as the investment of £8.3 billion over the Parliament in homegrown, clean nuclear power, alongside establishing a new government campus for energy that draws on the world-leading engineering expertise in Aberdeen, the Acorn carbon capture and storage project that he mentioned, and £750 million for a new supercomputer at Edinburgh University. Those are all genuinely exciting developments.
As my noble friend said, this is a record settlement for the Scottish Government since devolution in 1998. They will receive £50.9 billion per year on average between 2026-27 and 2028-29, including an additional £2.9 billion per year on average through the operation of the Barnett formula and £451 million of targeted capital funding in addition. My noble friend asked how we will ensure that that is spent on our priorities. Obviously, the best way to do that is to ensure that people vote Labour at the next election.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
Like my noble friend on the shadow Front Bench, I was surprised that the review suggested that a benefit-cost ratio of less than one could still be considered value for money. It also committed to publishing the BCR for all the cases. Can the Minister say when that will happen and whether it will also include projects from the NHS?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
The noble Baroness referred to the review of the Green Book. Its six key findings were that there was insufficient emphasis on place-based objectives; ineffectiveness at assessing transformational change; continued overemphasis on benefit-cost ratios in decision-making; overly long and complicated guidance; inadequate capacity and capability across the public sector; and poor transparency around appraisal. We will set out the information that she requires in due course.